2018 Speakers

Meet Our Speakers

David Isbitski

Chief Technical Evangelist | Amazon

David Isbitski

Chief Technical Evangelist | Amazon

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David Isbitski is Amazon's Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo, introducing the world to the power of Voice. He has helped launch numerous platforms and products at both Microsoft and Amazon and made a career out of helping people be successful with technology. Towards that end, he has delivered keynotes at major conferences around the world. A Jersey Shore native, David loves being near the ocean. He returns to his roots at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he graduated Cum Laude from the Honors Program with a B.A. in Information Systems.

Anne Weiler

Co-founder and CEO | Wellpepper

Anne Weiler

Co-founder and CEO | Wellpepper

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Anne Weiler, is co-founder and CEO of Wellpepper, a clinically validated and award-winning platform for digital patient treatment plans. She co-founded Wellpepper in late 2012 with Mike Van Snellenberg to address issues in communication and continuity of care after a personal experience when her mother was released from 6 months in the hospital with no instructions and a month before a follow-up visit. Anne’s expertise spans from concept to go-to-market for technology startups and established businesses. Prior to Wellpepper, Anne was VP of Marketing for iQMetrix, and Director of Product Management at Microsoft Corporation. She joined Microsoft in 2001 with the acquisition of Canadian web content management company Ncompass Labs.

Dr. Chiori Hori

Dr. Chiori Hori

Dr. Chiori Hori has worked on spoken language processing technologies since 1998. In 2002, she worked on spoken interactive Q&A using a real-time Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) based on Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) with over-a-million word vocabulary, at NTT. She joined CMU to work on speech translation/summarization technologies in 2004 and then moved to ATR/NIC in 2007. She led the NICT ASR research group and their system to first place in the English TED talk recognition at IWSLT for three consecutive years from 2012. She invented a WFST-based cross-lingual dialog technology which was implemented on a humanoid robot ASIMO and recipe on-the-fly dialog systems at NICT. She has been working on neural network based technologies for Human-Robot communication at MERL since 2015. She is a member of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and an editorial board of Computer Speech and Language.

Apoorva Bapat

Head of Natural Language Processing | PocketChange

Apoorva Bapat

Head of Natural Language Processing | PocketChange

Head of Natural Language Processing and most of Backend Development. I develop secure and accurate Natural Language Processing algorithms for accurately predicting text posts across user's web page suggesting PocketChange approved charities working for the cause. Establishing secure and quick communication between NLP algorithms on AWS machines and chrome extension.

Jeff Nelson

Founder/CTO & CEO | Blavity/Cinchapi

Jeff Nelson

Founder/CTO & CEO | Blavity/Cinchapi

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Jeff Nelson is the founder and CEO of Cinchapi, an intelligent data platform out of TechSquare Labs that provides real-time analytics and machine learning to help businesses gain insights faster to drive dynamic outcomes. He has flexed his tech muscles at MailChimp and Ionic Securityworked, and worked as a developer in Chicago, St. Louis, New York and the Bay Area before settling in Atlanta. Nelson is also the co-founder and CTO of media site, Blavity, where he curates perspectives on black experience. He holds a B.S., Computer Science, from Washington University in St. Louis.

JZ Zhang

Product Manager | Capital One

JZ Zhang

Product Manager | Capital One

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Call me JZ, like the rapper, even though my name is Jenny Zhang. After living in San Francisco and working in UX in NYC, now I’m working in the DC area as a Product Manager at Capital One. My favorite skill is paper prototyping and I’m passionate about involving designers/ developers/analysts early in the product planning process. I have spoken about card-based UX and shopping journeys, judged women in tech awards, organize my own meetup, and am part of a women in product mentoring group. I received my degree in Anthropology from Stanford University.

Ben Greenberg

Vice President, Product Design and Innovation | WebMD

Ben Greenberg

Vice President, Product Design and Innovation | WebMD

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As Vice President of Product Design & Innovation for WebMD, Ben Greenberg builds software that promotes patient wellness and provides decision support to physicians at the point of care. He recently led the design and development of WebMD’s groundbreaking new voice-assistant products, WebMD for Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Some of Ben’s most popular products include Medscape: Drugs and Diseases and the award-winning news and perspective app Medscape MedPulse, which won The Web Marketing Association’s Best Healthcare Provider Mobile Application in 2014. Before starting his career, Ben received a degree in Network Multimedia, with a focus on computer science and visual design, from Oberlin College.

Jan Neumann

Director, Applied AI Research | Comcast

Jan Neumann

Director, Applied AI Research | Comcast

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Jan Neumann leads the Comcast Applied Artificial Intelligence Research group with team members in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver and Silicon Valley. His team combines large-scale machine learning, deep learning, NLP and computer vision to develop novel algorithms and product concepts that improve the experience of Comcast's customers such as the X1 voice remote and personalization features, virtual assistants and predictive intelligence for customer service, as well as smart video and sensor analytics. Before Comcast, he worked for Siemens Corporate Research on various computer vision related projects such as driver assistance systems and video surveillance. He has published over 20 papers in scientific conferences and journals, and is a frequent speaker on machine learning and data science. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

John Rome

Deputy Chief Information Officer | Arizona State University

John Rome

Deputy Chief Information Officer | Arizona State University

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John Rome is an experienced IT leader, educator, consultant and technologist. He serves as Deputy CIO and Business Intelligence Strategist at Arizona State University, where he has taught and held various leadership positions over the past 15 years. He received his MBA from Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business and earned a BA, Computer Science/Business from Clarke University.

Shwen Gwee

GM, Digital Accelerator, (Global Drug Development), Novartis

Shwen Gwee

GM, Digital Accelerator, (Global Drug Development), Novartis

Shwen Gwee is a recognized pioneer in digital health and social pharma. An industry thought-leader, he was named a Top 40 “Healthcare Transformer” by MM&M in 2015, and a MM&M and PR Week Health Influencer 50 in 2017. Shwen brings over a decade of experience leading commercial/brand digital strategy and driving innovation across both client-side biopharma organizations and at leading advertising agencies. He currently serves as Head of Digital Strategy for Novartis and sits on various advisory boards, including: Google (Healthcare), SXSW (Health), MM&M Healthcare Transformers, emojiHEALTH, and the Digital Health Coalition. He is often featured in industry publications, speaks regularly at industry events and chairs the Social Innovation Day for the Digital Pharma Series (East, West and EU). A passionate contributor to the digital health startup community, Shwen organizes startup bootcamps, runs startup pitch contests and plays an active role running healthcare hackathons around the world as part of the MIT Hacking Medicine team.

Rob Dribbon

Strategic Alliances I Merck

Rob Dribbon

Strategic Alliances I Merck

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Rob Dribbon leads Merck’s Strategic Alliances efforts in the US with organizations considered to be technology disruptors. In his most recent previous role, he led Business Development and Strategy where he focused on innovation and collaboration with Merck’s top customers and stakeholders. This included the translation of ideas and concepts into health care solutions, represented as structured business opportunities. Previously, in Strategy and Planning, he assessed health care market trends to inform and develop Merck’s strategy in the U.S. Rob has also played a significant role in representing Merck in efforts to shape and improve the delivery and quality of health care in the U.S. An example of this is his leadership and collaboration on the patient-centered medical home model and his appointment as Executive Committee Liaison to the Board of Directors of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC). During the course of his career at Merck, Rob has held a wide range of positions in marketing, sales, managed care and strategy. His experience extends to many therapeutic areas as well as multiple health care segments, including primary care, subspecialty, health plan, federal, state, hospital, long-term care, pharmacy, employer and consumer. In addition, Rob was one of five employees across Merck selected as a Fellow in the inaugural Merck Fellowship for Global Health, where he developed initiatives with humanitarian organizations throughout Africa and Asia to provide meaningful and systematic improvements in health care delivery for people with the greatest need. He has continued to play a leadership role in the Fellowship program. Rob is a graduate of Rutgers University where he was a Henry Rutgers Scholar.

DJ Saul

Chief Marketing Officer | ISL (iStrategy/Labs)

DJ Saul

Chief Marketing Officer | ISL (iStrategy/Labs)

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DJ Saul is the CEO of ISL, a 2x AdAge Small Agency of The Year, for which he advises brands and early-stage ventures on everything from digital to experiential marketing strategy, to branding and partnership development. One of the company’s first employees, DJ led ISL’s marketing, partnerships and business development, as well as the company’s ongoing experimentation/prototyping efforts. He is now responsible for ISL's global offering and speaks regularly on emerging technology’s impact on the marketing landscape, building meaningful relationships, brand strategy, and entrepreneurship. Named as a 2017 Washingtonian Tech Titan, DJ studied International Affairs at George Washington University and Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is a member of NextGen Venture Partners, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Shapers, the Forbes Communication Council and co-founder of the DC Tech Meetup.

Justina Nguyen

Developer Evangelist | Dashbot

Justina Nguyen

Developer Evangelist | Dashbot

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Justina Nguyen is the Developer Evangelist for Dashbot where she fosters relationships with developers to understand their pain points and help them integrate advanced conversational analytics. She received a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley's Walter A. Haas School of Business where she was a mentor for Berkeley Women in Business. A fierce advocate for women’s rights, Justina served on the Advisory Board of the San Francisco Chapter of Girls in Tech where she was responsible for the digital and events marketing strategy between 2015-2017.

Shane Mac

CEO & Co-Founder | Assi.st

Shane Mac

CEO & Co-Founder | Assi.st

Shane Mac, the co-founder & CEO of Assist, bring the best services to your favorite messaging apps. Shane got into startups and tech through music with gigs as a DJ. This lead him to building sites, widgets and more for himself and his friends. He’s worked on products within startups like Gist (acquired by Blackberry), Zaarly, and is now in the super hot messaging space with Assist.

Ahmed Bouzid

Founder & CEO | WitLingo

Ahmed Bouzid

Founder & CEO | WitLingo

Ahmed Bouzid is Co-Founder and CEO at Witlingo, a Washington DC based company focused on building products and tool that enables organizations to deliver Ubiquitous Voice conversations on platforms such as Amazon's Alexa (Echo) and Google Home. Previously, Ahmed was Head of Product with Amazon.com's Alexa/Echo group, and earlier VP of Strategy & Innovation at Genesys. Ahmed has over 15 years of experience in the fields of Speech Automation and Natural Language Processing and has written extensively on Voice Automation and Voice User Interface design. He is the recent author of ""Don't Make Me Tap: A Common Sense Approach to Voice Usability"" and co-author of ""The Elements of VUI Style."" Ahmed is a co-inventor on several patents, awarded and pending, relating to Natural Language Processing, Speech Automation, and Mobility. He is also founder of the Ubiquitous Voice Societty and co-Chair of the DC Chapter of the American Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS). Ahmed holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from The George Washington University, a Master's degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and a PhD in the Philosophy of Science, also from Virginia Tech. He can be followed in twitter @Didou.

Jess Williams

CEO & Voice Designer, Opearlo

Jess Williams

CEO & Voice Designer, Opearlo

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Jess is the CEO & Voice Designer of Opearlo, a studio producing Alexa Skills across the games, productivity, kids and health & wellness categories. Some of the breakout Skills are Guess My Name, Find my Phone, and one for kids called Panda Rescue. Jess is a regular speaking at voice conferences, covering topics such as Lessons Learnt, Voice Design, and Monetisation on Alexa. She is also a Voice Design Tutor & Mentor for CareerFoundry’s Voice Design Course. Follow @Jess_P_Williams on Twitter Connect with Jess Williams on Linked In Visit www.opearlo.com to see what other skills the team have built! Read more about Jess here

Leor Grebler

CEO | Unified Computer Intelligence Corporation

Leor Grebler

CEO | Unified Computer Intelligence Corporation

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Leor drives UCIC towards its goal of making interaction with technology seamless and natural. He's worked with startups and large companies.

Preston So

Dir. of Research & Innovation | Acquia

Preston So

Dir. of Research & Innovation | Acquia

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Preston So has been a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, and a Drupal developer since 2007. As Director of Research and Innovation at Acquia, Preston leads Acquia Labs and new open-source and research initiatives. Previously, he managed the Entertainment Weekly website, led its development team at Time Inc., co-founded the Southern Colorado Drupal User Group (est. 2008), and operated an award-winning web and print design studio. Preston has presented at conferences on four continents and in multiple languages about diverse topics such as decoupled Drupal, responsive design, front-end development, and user experience. Most recently, Preston presented the keynotes at DrupalCamp Connecticut 2016 and, in Portuguese, at DrupalCamp Campinas 2016 in Brazil.

Juliana Pereira

Vice President Global Marketing | Smartling

Juliana Pereira

Vice President Global Marketing | Smartling

Juliana Pereira is Vice President of Marketing at Smartling. With 15 years experience in marketing and ecommerce, Juliana joined the Smartling team in 2015 after holding the role of Senior Director, Wholesale Online Strategy & Marketing at Ralph Lauren. Previously Juliana worked across various verticals and industries, from non-profits and publishing to tech and fashion, including key contributing roles at The Met Store at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ziff Davis, and eMusic. In addition to her passion for all things digital and marketing, Juliana is a semi-professional violinist and an advocate for music education, serving currently on the board of The School for Strings, a Suzuki method music school in Hell’s Kitchen. Juliana is an active volunteer with the Grants Advisory Committee at The New York Women’s Foundation, which seeks to create an equitable and just future for women and families across New York City. Juliana holds a B.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. from the New School.

Jack Welde

Co-founder and CEO | Smartling

Jack Welde

Co-founder and CEO | Smartling

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Jack is a technology early-adopter, serial entrepreneur, software patent-holder, product evangelist and combat-decorated Air Force pilot. Before founding Smartling, he served as SVP of Product at eMusic and COO/CTO at SheSpeaks and RunTime Technologies. He also co-founded Trio Development, a software company that created the first personal information manager, which was acquired by Apple in 1993. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also studied linguistics and interned with Professor William Labov, and an MBA from Cameron University in Germany.

Lauren Golembiewski

CEO & Founder | Voxable

Lauren Golembiewski

CEO & Founder | Voxable

Lauren Golembiewski is CEO and Co-founder of Voxable, an agency that builds conversational interfaces for products and companies. Lauren has a wealth of experience leading design strategy for early and mid-stage startups as well as large enterprises. At Voxable, Lauren applies her design and user experience expertise to build usable and delightful conversational interfaces for Voxable’s clients. She’s well-known for her in-depth knowledge of the underlying technologies.

Brian Crum

Sr. Product Manager | Amazon for Business

Brian Crum

Sr. Product Manager | Amazon for Business

Experienced People Manager and Product Manager within both B2B and B2C teams. Product Management, Team Leadership, Business Development, Marketing, and (Agile) Product Development experience. Dad to 3 amazing kids, part-time golfer, and full-time Senior Product Manager on the Amazon Alexa team. Graduate of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (D '11) and the United States Naval Academy (USNA '03). Current project work includes confidential projects to empower developers worldwide to build for the future UX - voice & multi-modal natural user interfaces. Previous, the Senior Product Manager for Amazon Prime Student, managing new and sustaining products to better attract, engage, and retain young customer for Amazon. Previously, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Surface, leading Premium Experience and Customer Care efforts, including positioning, branding, packaging, and customer experience across all end-user touch points, combined with post-purchase customer care and retention efforts. Additional project work included Microsoft's PGA Tour partnership to deliver custom-built Surface devices enabling more accurate and faster data collection, and launching the first Signature Type Cover. Formerly on the Surface team, I created and led the ""Designed for Surface"" (DFS) 3rd party accessories licensing and partnership program, including partner business development, partner management, and product channel integration. Additional project work included delivering all Surface accessories onto NFL sidelines, and the MS-PayPal partnership. Before Surface, I was the Technical Product Marketing Manager for Lync (now Skype for Business), leading mobile app launches across all platforms - including iOS, Android, and Windows. Specialties: Product Management, Team Leadership, Marketing and Business Strategy, Product Development, Retail & Commercial Channel Marketing, Social & Web Strategy, Change Leadership, and General Management.

Will Hall

Chief Creative Officer | RAIN Agency

Will Hall

Chief Creative Officer | RAIN Agency

Will is the Chief Creative Officer at RAIN, leading combined teams of strategists, engineers, and designers. He serves on multiple advisory boards on Voice and emerging technology, and has been declared the "winner" of Pinterest. Over the past 14 years, he's worked at agencies with key clients like Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, Sony, Adult Swim, Puma and others. He is also an adjunct professor of Design at NYU.

Cami Williams

Senior Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Cami Williams

Senior Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Cami works as a Senior Evangelist on Alexa for Amazon based in Seattle focused on Alexa Games. Since starting at Amazon in September 2017, Cami has spoken on behalf of Alexa at various conferences and workshops, including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, reInvent, Consumer Electronics Show, and Game Developers Conference. Cami is proud to be an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. As a representative from the community she has spoken at over 40 different hackathons and events, most notably the GHC, the White House Tech Inclusion Summit, SXSWedu, ATECH Conference, and Google Women Engineers Conference. During her free time, Cami loves to play board games with friends, build mechanical keyboards, and quote the Office.

Akersh Srivastava

Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Akersh Srivastava

Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Akersh Srivastava spreads the word about the wonders of voice in his role as Alexa Evangelist based at Amazon's Seattle headquarters. Previously, he served as Manager, Advanced Technology and Architecture for Accenture in Los Angeles, and honed his skills as a technology researcher, web architect, and developer.

Rob McCauley

Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Rob McCauley

Alexa Evangelist | Amazon

Robert McCauley is a software engineer and Alexa Solutions Architect at Amazon.com. He helps to organize and run Hackathons for the Amazon Alexa developer community and supports developers learning the Alexa Skills Kit to build new, voice-enabled applications. He's extremely happy at his current job. Robert earned his BSEE in Electrical Engineering at Bucknell University.

Nikhil Deshpande

Chief Digital Officer | State of Georgia

Nikhil Deshpande

Chief Digital Officer | State of Georgia

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As Chief Digital Officer for the state of Georgia, Nikhil Deshpande leads the Office of Digital Services Georgia under the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA). Nikhil envisioned and led state government’s transition to an enterprise web-publishing platform based on Drupal, an open source content management system hosted in the cloud. The platform currently supports over 80 state agency websites. Under his direction, Georgia became the first state in the nation to use Drupal across it's enterprise and meet special needs of constituents with a range of disabilities affecting vision, hearing, motion and cognition making the platform Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. Nikhil strongly advocated the use of social media for Georgia.gov when using social media for government was not common, and established a presence for the state on Facebook and Twitter to quickly address citizens’ questions and concerns. Nikhil also served as adjunct faculty at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design for ten years, where he taught graduate classes in Interaction Design and Game Development.

Lauren Lucchese

Head of AI Content Design | Capital One

Lauren Lucchese

Head of AI Content Design | Capital One

Lauren is an AI Content + UX designer. She currently leads the AI Content Design team at Capital One, designing conversations for the Capital One skill on Alexa and for Eno, the first natural language SMS chatbot created by a U.S. bank. If you want to get her talking, ask her what she’s reading, or where she’s hoping to travel to next. Also, she loves meeting new designers and technologists! You can find her on Twitter as @laurenlookayz, and can connect with her here on LinkedIn.

Jeanine Heck

Vice President, Comcast AI Product | Comcast

Jeanine Heck

Vice President, Comcast AI Product | Comcast

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As Vice President of Product Management for Comcast’s Technology and Product organization, Jeanine Gubler Heck leads the company’s efforts to bring artificial intelligence into XFINITY products. Since she joined Comcast in 2007, Jeanine has been founding product manager for the X1 voice remote with over 4 billion total voice commands and led the launch of a cloud-based TV search engine and the company's first TV recommendations engine. She was the founding leader of Comcast's Women's Network for its inaugural three years and mentor to the BambieBotz, the first robotics team of St. Hubert's High School for Girls. Jeanine received her B.S., Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia University.

Nicholas Carlini

research scientist, Google Brain

Nicholas Carlini

research scientist, Google Brain

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Nicholas Carlini is a research scientist at Google Brain, where he studies machine learning and computer security. His most recent line of work studies properties of neural networks from an adversarial perspective, for which he has received best paper awards at ICML and IEEE S&P. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.

Chris Brogan

President, Chris Brogan Media

Chris Brogan

President, Chris Brogan Media

Chris Brogan is president of Chris Brogan Media, offering business and marketing advisory help for mid to larger sized companies. He also helps small business owners through classes and webinars at Owner Media Group. Chris is a sought after keynote speaker and the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and counting. His next book is about how companies can extend trusted relationships using AI, blockchain, chatbots, IoT, and video. Chris has spoken for or consulted with the biggest brands you know, including Disney, Coke, Google, GM, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker, Titleist, Scotts, Humana Health, Cisco, Sony USA, and many more. He’s appeared on the Dr. Phil Show, interviewed Richard Branson for a cover story for Success magazine, and once even presented to a Princess.

Katherine Ong

Founder/CEO, WO Strategies LLC

Katherine Ong

Founder/CEO, WO Strategies LLC

Katherine Watier Ong is an online marketing instructor, public speaker, and consultant. She’s also conducted the first study of consumer adoption of wearable computers back in 2003. She has more than 20 years of experience in communications strategy and online delivery of communications messages, including thirteen years of SEO, social media, SEM, and web analytics management. Katherine has provided digital marketing and go-to-market strategies for a variety of brands including: Cancer.gov, HealthIT.gov, New York Health Benefits Exchange (NYStateofHealth.gov), RollCall.com, CreativeDrive, National Honey Board, Environmental Working Group and others. She has spoken about online marketing issues and search engine optimization (SEO) for Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Online Marketing Summit, the American Marketing Association, Public Relations Society of America, DC Digital Capital Week, and more.

Robert Herzog

CEO, eCaring

Robert Herzog

CEO, eCaring

Robert Herzog is a pioneer in applying emerging technologies to unique business problems, and has worked extensively and successfully both as an entrepreneur and as senior executive with startup companies such as Motionbox, Diva, ON2 Corp, Softcom, Granite Films, and City Winery, major corporations including JPMorgan Chase, Cahners Communications and the Sarnoff Research Center, and not-for-profits including New Jersey Appleseed and Ecotrust. He has been a successful entrepreneur for 30 years.

Jason CranfordTeague

Principle, The CranfordTeague Group

Jason CranfordTeague

Principle, The CranfordTeague Group

Jason is a creative strategist, writer, and speaker who has written numerous books and articles about digital design and creative development. His books include the best selling CSS Visual Quickstart Guide and Final Cut Pro and the Art of Filmmaking. He is a regular speaker at leading conferences including SXSW, WebVisions, and The Internet Summit and teaches classes in experience design at Drexel University. As an internet industry leader for over twenty years, Jason has worked with clients like Virgin Group, The Aspen Institute, The XPrize Foundation, The EPA, Capital One, and Marriott International to find innovative solutions for their experience design products.

Nancy Munro

CEO, Nancy Munro

Nancy Munro

CEO, Nancy Munro

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Nancy Munro, former CEO of KnowledgeShift and founder of Verbal Transactions, has over 25 years in helping organizations implement and deploy learning strategies. Nancy has worked with organizations like CVS, AT&T, and HP helping them decipher how best to address performance challenges that align with their structural capabilities and revenue goals. Nancy pioneered voice-enabled technologies in the corporate training space and was the first to launch an interactive role-playing simulator designed to measure what is being said and how it is being said. Using a creative approach with cloud-based IVR’s she invented the first podcasting platform that could measure how much content the listener consumed. At Verbal Transactions, she spends her time with deploying their immersive call center simulator ACES which utilized speech recognition and text to speech technology. Nancy speaks at various conferences such as the eLearning Guild, ASTD, and AA-ISP and was the Chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago for three years. Nancy has a Bachelor’s Degree from Northwest Missouri State University and has completed the Tuck Bridge Executive Education program at Dartmouth.

Jason Snook

Managing Director, Customer Experience, CapTech

Jason Snook

Managing Director, Customer Experience, CapTech

Jason Snook has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Virginia Tech. He is a Managing Director in the Customer Experience (CX) Practice Area at CapTech Consulting. A self-described "quant," he believes that superior digital experiences hinge on solid research and data. He has over 15 years of UX/CX experience, helping companies design experiences that are easier and more effective for customers and employees. Jason lives in Richmond, VA with his beautiful wife and wonderful kids. In his “free time” he is involved with several local non-profits serving the poor and hurting in the city he loves.

Dee Kanejiya

Founder & CEO, Cognii

Dee Kanejiya

Founder & CEO, Cognii

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Dee Kanejiya is founder and CEO of Cognii, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence technology to the education industry. Dee has 17 years of experience in AI, speech recognition, natural language processing, consumer web, and the education industries. Most recently, he was part of the core technology teams at Vlingo and then Nuance that pioneered the virtual personal assistant technology for smartphones such as the S-Voice on Samsung Galaxy devices. He studied PhD in Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi and carried out post-doc research at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He is passionate about improving the quality and affordability of education with the help of advanced technologies.

Crystal Yan

UX Lead, Independent

Crystal Yan

UX Lead, Independent

Crystal Yan is a product and experience design leader focused on empowering organizations to be more customer-centric. Currently, she advises clients in the technology, healthcare, education, and nonprofit sectors as an independent consultant. Previously, Crystal led the user experience team at a civic tech startup transforming how organizations interact with governments worldwide. Crystal holds a degree in Economics from Amherst College and has worked in the US, India, China, and Cambodia. She has spoken at several conferences in the US, China, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, Chile, Norway, and the UK.

Alex Capecelatro

Co-Founder & CEO, Josh.ai

Alex Capecelatro

Co-Founder & CEO, Josh.ai

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Alex started his career as a research scientist for NASA, the Naval Research Lab, and Sandia National Lab. He later joined Fisker Automotive heading sustainability initiatives across design and engineering. In 2010 he left to launch At The Pool and Yeti, social apps reaching members in more than 120 countries. Alex has an engineering degree from UCLA, lives in Los Angeles, and likes to ski, bike, and skydive.

Dustin Coates

Manager, Solutions Engineering, Algolia

Dustin Coates

Manager, Solutions Engineering, Algolia

Dustin Coates is a software engineer, and a conversational search expert at the search engine API provder Algolia. He's the author of the forthcoming book, Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant, co-host of the VUX World podcast on the Voicefirst.fm network, and has spoken at several conferences and events on building for voice-first. He lives in Paris, with his fiancée and six voice-first devices in a one bedroom space.

Zuby Onwuta

Founder, Think and Zoom

Zuby Onwuta

Founder, Think and Zoom

Zuby Onwuta is the inventor of "Think and Zoom: Brain control for Blind Assistive Tech", and Founder of Think and Zoom, a startup that is "creating a world where visual impairment no longer steals dreams or kills careers". Hardships from losing his medical, US Army and engineering dreams to visual impairment, inspired him to invent "Think and Zoom", a solution that reads and responds to human brain waves, to provide vision augmentation and reading assistance. Previous work experience include software engineering roles at Lucent, Goldman Sachs & Co and IBM. Accomplishments include speaking engagements at TEDx, SXSW, United Nations and Disability Advocacy at the US Congress. He is also a recipient of the Volunteer Service Award from President Barack Obama. He holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and business certificates from MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School. More about him is available at ZubyOnwuta.com.

Diana Mingels

Software Engineering Manager, NLG, Capital One

Diana Mingels

Software Engineering Manager, NLG, Capital One

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Currently head of Natural Language Generation (NLG) at Capital One’s AI team, Diana is working on new approaches and methodologies on how to enhance the NLG capabilities in today’s dialogue systems and how to safely and effectively bring those enhancements into production. Diana has been involved in AI research and development for more than a decade, throughout which she contributed extensively to various virtual assistants that are leading the market today. She resided and worked in various European countries and the United States. She is fluent in 5 languages and possess a unique understanding of cultural nuances, which gives her a particular edge in researching and developing dialogue systems. Diana holds a M.S. in Mathematical Linguistics from St. Petersburg State University (RU) and a M.A. in Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology from the University of Wolverhampton (UK). She recently started pursuing her PhD in the field of NLG.

Jeff Blankenburg

Alexa Evangelist, Amazon

Jeff Blankenburg

Alexa Evangelist, Amazon

Jeff Blankenburg spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, Sydney, Tokyo, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

Adva Levin

Founder, Pretzel Labs

Adva Levin

Founder, Pretzel Labs

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Adva Levin is a conversation designer and the founder of Pretzel Labs, an award-winning voice design studio that creates voice-first games. Her game Kids Court, an Alexa based judge that settles kids’ fights, won the grand prize in the Alexa kid skill challenge. Adva holds a B.Sc in Mathematics and Economics from Tel Aviv University, and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Columbia University, and has over 8 years of experience in product/content roles in the start up world.

Kyree Holmes

User Experience Researcher, Comcast

Kyree Holmes

User Experience Researcher, Comcast

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"Kyree is a proud native Philadelphian who has lived all across the city. Originally on track to pursue a career in marketing, she serendipitously discovered the User Experience (UX) field and fell in love with it. She is currently a User Experience Researcher at Comcast, leading research efforts to enhance current Xfinity products and services and inform the design of future projects. Wanting to introduce others to the UX field, Kyree also founded Onyx Valley, a community building organization designed to identify and prepare diverse talent for careers in the tech field. Kyree is a graduate of Howard University’s School of Business and completed her Master’s degree in Design at Carnegie Mellon University."

Jan Koenig

Co-founder, Jovo

Jan Koenig

Co-founder, Jovo

Jan König is one of the founders of [Jovo](https://www.jovo.tech/), the first open-source framework for cross-platform voice apps for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Jovo was recently one of 8 voice companies to go through the [voicecamp](https://betaworks.com/voicecamp) accelerator by betaworks in NYC.

Bret Kinsella

CEO / Editor, Voicebot.ai

Bret Kinsella

CEO / Editor, Voicebot.ai

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Bret Kinsella is Editor and Founder of Voicebot.ai, the leading publication for research, news and analysis of the voice and AI industries. He is a frequent speaker in the U.S. and Europe and also hosts the weekly Voicebot Podcast where he interviews the entrepreneurs, engineers and executives shaping the voice technology landscape. Bret is also a practitioner in voice app development where he has contributed to the design of several popular voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Home. A past executive of Sapient, Accenture and Harris Corporation and an officer in several startups, he has served Fortune 500 clients in the U.S., Europe and Latin America throughout his career. Bret earned degrees from UCLA and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and can be found most weekends running in the mountains.

Bree Glaeser

Innovation Strategist, The Mars Agency

Bree Glaeser

Innovation Strategist, The Mars Agency

"Bree Glaeser is a creative strategist with a strong point of view on designing for voice experiences (VUI). She leads the emerging voice practice at The Mars Agency, a global marketing agency specializing in marketing to shoppers, and was a core member of the team responsible for dreaming up and bringing to life the first-of-its-kind voice assistant at brick and mortar retail, SmartAisle (SM). Bree got into the voice and conversational commerce space via a background in design thinking and innovation. She has acted as a coach/industry expert supporting the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Program, Tech in the Tenderloin, and other innovation groups in the Bay Area, to help students and professionals identify insights and ideate consumer/user-driven solutions. Prior to The Mars Agency, Bree worked on a variety of projects for major brands like Unilever, Danone, and Mondalez, as a freelance marketing strategist. She also has 5 years of academic research experience as a research assistant for Harvard Medical School and The New School for Social Research. She holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Design and Management from Parsons School of Design and a bachelor’s in Clinical Psychology from Westminster College."

Ethan Goodman

SVP, Innovation, The Mars Agency

Ethan Goodman

SVP, Innovation, The Mars Agency

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As SVP of Innovation at The Mars Agency, Ethan helps to drive growth and technology breakthroughs for the agency’s Fortune 500 clients and industry-leading brands. A nationally-renowned marketing strategist with deep expertise in digital and shopper marketing, Ethan was named in Adweek’s March 2012 “Young Influentials” list, which recognizes the top 20 marketing and advertising professionals in the US under the age of 40. Previously, as Director of Digital Strategy at Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide, he implemented results-driving digital strategies (spanning social media, mobile, etc.) for various Fortune 100 clients. He was also instrumental in growing the agency’s burgeoning eCommerce practice, which gained notoriety for its unique Shopper Back™ approach to strategy and design. Prior to joining Leo Burnett/Arc, Ethan spent four years at The Mars Agency where he built the foundation for their Digital Shopper Marketing team. He is a proud graduate of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan (BBA ’05), a devout Michigan Football fan and an avid skier. He currently resides in Ann Arbor, MI.

Yancey Hall

Senior Manager, EY

Yancey Hall

Senior Manager, EY

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Yancey Hall is a Digital and Emerging Technology practice leader at EY, specializing in digital transformation for public and private sector organizations. Over the past 20 years, Yancey has led program and product development across the digital ecosystem that includes cloud and mobile transformation, application development, digital strategy, organizational change, emerging technology and other areas. He’s passionate about helping organizations build cultures that can sustain digital transformation and innovate. When he’s not working, Yancey enjoys spending time fly fishing, playing backyard games with the kids and running the trails of Fairfax County in Virginia.

Vineet Sinha

R&D Emerging Tech, Salesforce

Vineet Sinha

R&D Emerging Tech, Salesforce

Vineet Sinha drives Salesforce's initiatives to push and explore boundaries for emerging technologies. In this role, Vineet's work involves making voice-enabled devices to have sophisticated conversations with users and using vision tracking to trigger better user experiences. Previously he has started multiple companies and has led efforts for building smart users interfaces around large data sources. Vineet has a PhD from the CS+AI Lab at MIT focusing on these challenges.

Phillip Hunter

VP of Product, Pulse Labs

Phillip Hunter

VP of Product, Pulse Labs

"Phillip is on startup number 4. As VP of Product at Pulse Labs, he is co-creating the only company focused on assessing customer experience for voice apps at scale. He previously led UX for the Amazon Alexa Skills Kit, focusing on both tools for skill creation and Alexa customer experiences. Before that he guided console and product design efforts and teams for dozens of Amazon Web Services, including S3, database services, and new service launches for Mobile Hub, Pinpoint, Lex, and Cloud Directory. Phillip has designed and created strategy for voice-based products and services for hundreds of customer service systems, Microsoft Cortana and Xbox, and now Amazon Alexa. He has led, managed, inspired, trained, and mentored hundreds of UX and product management professionals."

Brooke Hawkins

Content Designer, Nuance

Brooke Hawkins

Content Designer, Nuance

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Brooke is a designer at Nuance currently working to create conversational interfaces for Fortune 500 companies. She has years of experience in the voice field, from designing conversational interfaces for healthcare to writing courses on the foundations of voice design. Brooke is interested in the intersection of social justice and design, how poorly designed products uphold systems of oppression, and is interested in training other marginalized designers who are ready to enter the burgeoning field of voice design.

Cathy Pearl

Head of Conversation Design Outreach, Google

Cathy Pearl

Head of Conversation Design Outreach, Google

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Cathy Pearl is Head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google, and the author of the O'Reilly book "Designing Voice User Interfaces." Previously, she was VP of User Experience at Sensely, whose virtual-nurse avatar, Molly, helps people engage with their healthcare. She has worked on everything from NASA helicopter-pilot simulators to a conversational iPad app in which Esquire magazine's style columnist tells users what they should wear on a first date. During her time at Nuance and Microsoft, Cathy designed VUIs for banks, airlines, and Ford SYNC. She holds a BS in Cognitive Science from UCSD and an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University. She also enjoys getting her Amazon Echo & Google Home to talk to each other.

Collin Davis

General Manager, Alexa for Business, Amazon

Collin Davis

General Manager, Alexa for Business, Amazon

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Collin is the General Manager of Alexa for Business, which was made available to the public in November 2017 and turns Amazon Alexa into an intelligent assistant that helps professionals be more productive at work. Collin and his team help customers think about new ways to use conversational interfaces to eliminate tedious everyday tasks, allowing them to focus on the work that demands their unique skillsets. Collin has worked for Amazon Web Services for four years, where he helped launch several other productivity applications prior to conceiving of Alexa for Business and building the team that created it. He has more than 15 years of experience building technologies that span both the consumer and business worlds. Collin holds a Computer Science degree from UCLA and lives in Seattle.

Lauren Lucchese

Head of AI Content Design, Capital One

Lauren Lucchese

Head of AI Content Design, Capital One

"Lauren is an AI Content + UX designer. She currently leads the AI Content Design team at Capital One, designing conversations for the Capital One skill on Alexa and for Eno, the first natural language SMS chatbot created by a U.S. bank. If you want to get her talking, ask her what she’s reading, or where she’s hoping to travel to next. Also, she loves meeting new designers and technologists! You can find her on Twitter as @laurenlookayz, and can connect with her here on LinkedIn."

Jennifer Warner

Senior Editor, Mayo Clinic

Jennifer Warner

Senior Editor, Mayo Clinic

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Jennifer Warner is senior editor at Mayo Clinic's Global Business Solutions where she contributes to content strategy, planning and execution of voice-enabled content projects, health information libraries, web site development and other initiatives. Her health journalism career began in Russia covering President Boris Yeltsin's heart surgery while working for ABC News. She then rode the wave of the dot-com boom as a writer and editor at CBSHealthWatch.com and WebMD and enjoyed a stint as a wine educator in New Zealand before joining Mayo Clinic in 2014.

Ha-Hoa Hamano

Senior Product Manager, NPR

Ha-Hoa Hamano

Senior Product Manager, NPR

Ha-Hoa Hamano, Senior Product Manager on the NPR Digital Media team, has been spurring efforts to make NPR accessible to users on a range of new platforms, including connected cars and smart TVs. In 2017, she played a crucial part in NPR’s push to bring its vast world of content to smart speakers, where NPR is now the top option for news updates on all major platforms. Her work helps give audiences the power to activate NPR’s voices with their own.

Vince Farquharson

Senior Interaction Designer, NPR

Vince Farquharson

Senior Interaction Designer, NPR

Vince is the lead designer for NPR's multiplatform experiences. He has over 15 years of interaction design experience with world-class organizations that include NPR, Marriott, AOL & PBS. He is curious about the future of news, entertainment and art.

Katie Briggs

‎Product Designer, NPR

Katie Briggs

‎Product Designer, NPR

Katie Briggs is a product designer at NPR. Her previous design experience includes leading design at KPCC – Southern California Public Radio, introducing design thinking at Houston Public Media, and instructing color theory and corporate identity classes.

Jake Kelly

Developer Evangelist, MoDev

Jake Kelly

Developer Evangelist, MoDev

Jake has been traveling through the country teaching developers in Alexa skill-building workshops. He has been a champion of voice technology since the early 1990s, when he saw a movie depicting the Future McFly family using their voice-enabled smarthome. When he's not training people to build engaging voice skills, he's enjoying the Colorado sunshine with his family.

Tim Kahle

Co-Founder, 169 Labs GmbH

Tim Kahle

Co-Founder, 169 Labs GmbH

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Tim is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich, one of the leading German voice assistant agencies. With more than 10 years of experience in UX / UI design and online marketing he is now responsible for the conception, design and marketing of voice applications.

Janeen Uzzell

Former Head of Women in Technology, GE

Janeen Uzzell

Former Head of Women in Technology, GE

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Global Technology Executive, People Developer, Transformational Leader, Storyteller, Engineer and self-proclaimed Global Citizen, Janeen Uzzell is a native New Jerseyan on a mission to use her influence and voice to lead causal work that changes lives, communities and the world. Regarded as a pioneering global strategist, she is adept in identifying market barriers and conceptualizing new models to impact customer performance and profitability. During her time as an ex-Pat in Africa, Janeen gained entrepreneurial and start-up experience in a high-risk market and worked to push boundaries with integrity and collaborative teaming. A noted thought leader and influencer, Janeen uses storytelling as a way to link business models and solutions to engage, inspire, and ignite shifts in global policies and practices. Most recently, Janeen was the Head of Women in Technology for GE where she worked across the 300,000-employee community leading a culture shift to accelerate the number of women within the Company’s technical female workforce. Beyond her professional achievements, she is a Board Member for the International Black Women’s Public Policy Institute, a former Co-Chair for the United Nation’s Medical Device Innovative Working Group, an adviser for the National Believers in Business Collegiate Organization and a sought-after public speaker.

Don White

CEO and Cofounder, Satisfi Labs

Don White

CEO and Cofounder, Satisfi Labs

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"Don White is a high-energy strategist with a unique ability to connect complex technology solutions with his client’s most immediate needs. As CEO of Satisfi Labs, Don spearheads client development and revenue initiatives. Prior to Satisfi Labs, he was head of sales for Datahug, a SaaS company that provided sales analytics and predictive forecasting -- purchased by CallidusCloud in 2016. Don has also held several leadership positions at Bloomberg Tradebook, most recently as head of sales for the Americas where he managed the $110M sales & strategy division. "

Patricia Scanlon

Founder and CEO, Soapbox Labs

Patricia Scanlon

Founder and CEO, Soapbox Labs

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With over 20 years experience in artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology, Dr. Patricia Scanlon has spent the majority of her career working on the commercialisation of research innovations. Currently founder and CEO of SoapBox Labs, building voice technology for kids, which has raised over €3 million in funding to date. Scanlon holds a PhD in Speech Recognition technology and Machine Learning systems and has held positions with Columbia University in New York, IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin and Nokia Bell Labs.

Tom Edwards

Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, Epsilon

Tom Edwards

Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, Epsilon

Tom Edwards is the Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, Agency, at Epsilon. For the past 18 years, Tom has focused on the intersection of emerging technology and its impact on consumer behavior and how to bring "Innovation to Reality(TM)". He was recently recognized by Advertising Age as a 2017 Marketing Technology Trailblazer. Tom regularly provides thought leadership and commentary in business and advertising publications and speaks regularly as a futurist at events including: TEDx, Ad Age Data, Mobile World Congress and more on the topics of data design, artificial intelligence and the evolution of consumer experience through intelligent systems. Prior to Epsilon, Tom was EVP, Digital Strategy and Innovation for Omnicom’s The Marketing Arm and SVP, Digital Strategy and Emerging Technology for Red Urban, part of DDB Worldwide. He also previously served as Chief Marketing Officer for cloud-based social solution provider INgage networks. Twitter = @BlackFIn360, Tom's content can be found at http://blackfin360.com/blog

Melinda Wittstock

CEO and Founder, Verifeed LLC + WINGS of Inspired Business Podcast

Melinda Wittstock

CEO and Founder, Verifeed LLC + WINGS of Inspired Business Podcast

Melinda Wittstock is a visionary entrepreneur and innovator with 25+ years experience as an award-winning host, journalist and entrepreneurial executive across the world’s top media brands (BBC, London Times, ABC, CNBC). She has launched and led four successful media, tech, mobile apps and predictive data analytics businesses and brings deep cross-disciplinary expertise to her projects. She is a passionate advocate for evolved social enterprise businesses using AI and innovative technologies. Currently CEO and Founder of predictive social analytics company Verifeed™, she created the Return on Authenticity™ (ROA™) algorithms for targeted and viral social media engagement.You can meet her on her ChatBot at https://melindawings.com and hear her host her daily podcast on female entrepreneurship called 'WINGS of Inspired Business' to help women get the right mindset to manifest the mojo and money they need to land their moonshot. Melinda’s personal moonshot is to invest $10mm+ in 100+ female-founded and social impact companies in the next 10 years.

Galia Kedmi Fragman

Head of Strategy & Biz Dev, Beyond Verbal

Galia Kedmi Fragman

Head of Strategy & Biz Dev, Beyond Verbal

Galia Kedmi Fragman is a leading Strategy & Corporate Development expert with over 20 years' experience in early-stage start-ups as well as in Fortune 500 corporations. Galia has a B.A in Computer Science and Management. Galia brings her vast experience in strategic planning and scaling to Beyond Verbal. She focuses on global reach and strategic partnerships, leads business development activities, and translates innovation to success. Her previous positions include: New Strategic Ventures at SanDisk, GM Europe at SRL Group, Head of Global Partnerships at Karhoo and Co-Founder of multiple start-ups. Galia initiated and still leads a Junior Entrepreneurship Program for high-school students.

Ron Schmelzer

Managing Director / Principal Analyst, Cognilytica

Ron Schmelzer

Managing Director / Principal Analyst, Cognilytica

Ron is principal analyst and founder of Cognilytica, a Washington, DC based firm, focused on AI and advising on Machine Learning, Enterprise Architecture, venture capital, startup and entrepreneurial ecosystems. He hosts the AI Today podcast and serves as SXSW Innovation Awards Judge, founder and operator of TechBreakfast demo format events, and has served on standards bodies such as RosettaNet, UDDI, and ebXML. Prior to founding Cognilytica, Ron founded and ran ZapThink, an industry analyst firm focused on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Computing, Web Services, XML, & Enterprise Architecture, which was acquired by Dovel Technologies in August 2011. Ron has started and sold a number of successful companies that have collectively employed hundreds of people, raised over $60M in Venture funding and exited in the millions. Ron was founder and chief organizer of TechBreakfast – the largest monthly morning tech meetup in the nation with over 50,000 members and 3000+ attendees at the monthly events across the US including Baltimore, DC, NY, Boston, Austin, Silicon Valley, Philadelphia, Raleigh and more. He is currently mentor & investor in the TechStars seed stage investment program, where he has been involved since 2009. Ron is the lead author of XML And Web Services Unleashed (SAMS 2002) and co-author of Service-Orient or Be Doomed (Wiley 2006) with Jason Bloomberg. Ron received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and MBA from Johns Hopkins University.

Greg Levy

Sr. Product Manager, Amazon Appstore, Amazon

Greg Levy

Sr. Product Manager, Amazon Appstore, Amazon

Franklin Lobb

Sr. Solutions Architect

Franklin Lobb

Sr. Solutions Architect

Vanessa Colina

UX Designer

Vanessa Colina

UX Designer

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Vanessa is a User Experience designer from Venezuela, based in Washington DC. Her focus is in user research for mobile applications that use emerging technologies such as Blockchain, AI, AR/VR.

Rob Bennett

CEO, Rehab

Rob Bennett

CEO, Rehab

Rob Bennett is CEO of rehab, a leading creative technology company that specializes in delivering 1:1 consumer experiences for today’s premium brands. Headquartered in London, with offices in New York City, Warsaw and Los Angeles, rehab delivers emerging technology solutions and services across multiple disciplines including strategy, creative, user experience (UX), design, creative technology and development. The company works with leading global brands including Facebook, Google, Nike, HBO, Möet Hennessy, Zappos, HSBC and Estée Lauder, and has been honored with numerous industry, business and entertainment awards including the Emmy, Deloitte Technology Fast 50, Digiday and Cannes Lion awards. Prior to rehab, Rob worked with Samsung and oversaw the launch of their SmartThings and Connected Home products. He is a passionate advocate for moving marketing beyond the status quo of conventional advertising.

James Poulter

Head of Emerging Platforms, Digital Consumer Engagement, LEGO

James Poulter

Head of Emerging Platforms, Digital Consumer Engagement, LEGO

As Head of The LEGO Group’s Emerging Platforms & Partnerships team as part of the Digital Consumer Engagement division, James Poulter is pursuing new technologies, platforms and partners to build digital consumer engagement with LEGO customers, shoppers and consumers on a global basis. James previously was the Social Lead for LEGO’s social network for Kids, LEGO Life – which launched globally in 2017 and has since grown to over 1m active users regularly posting their content to the world’s first global and safe social network for kids. As well as devising and developing social features such as LEGO Life’s emoji keyboard, custom characters and moderation systems, James oversaw the launch of LEGO’s global partnership with GIPHY leading the LEGO channel to accrue over 1 Billion GIF views in it’s first year.

Rebecca Evanhoe

VUI Designer, Mobiquity

Rebecca Evanhoe

VUI Designer, Mobiquity

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Rebecca is a UX writer and VUI designer with 8 years of experience. Her work in conversation design began with building virtual patient conversations for healthcare training, and most recently she designs voice-forward experiences, from Alexa skills to multimodal interactions.

Kathleen Walch

Managing Director / Principal Analyst, Cognilytica

Kathleen Walch

Managing Director / Principal Analyst, Cognilytica

"Kathleen is a serial entrepreneur, savvy marketer, AI and Machine Learning expert, and tech industry connector. She is a principal analyst and founder of Cognilytica, an AI research and advisory firm, and co-host of the popular AI Today podcast. Prior to her work at Cognilytica, Kathleen founded tech startup-up HourlyBee, an online scheduling system for home services where she quickly became an expert in grassroots marketing, networking, and employee management. Before that, Kathleen was a key part of the direct marketing operation for Harte Hanks managing large scale direct mail campaigns for clients including Bed Bath and Beyond and BuyBuyBaby. Managing mailings with millions of records each month, she created efficiencies in the process saving thousands of dollars and days of processing time from each campaign. Kathleen then spent many years as the Content and Innovation Director for TechBreakfast, the largest monthly morning tech meetup in the nation with over 50,000 members and 3000+ attendees at the monthly events across the US including Baltimore, DC, NY, Boston, Austin, Silicon Valley, Philadelphia, Raleigh and more. In addition she is a SXSW Innovation Awards Judge and AI / Hardware Meetup organizer. As a master facilitator and connector, who is well connected in the technology industry, Kathleen regularly meets with innovators in key markets and gets the opportunity to see the latest and newest technologies from game changing companies. Kathleen graduated from Loyola University with a degree in Marketing. In her spare time she enjoys hanging out with her husband and two young girls and working out – you can frequently find her on jogging paths and workout studios."

James Koran

SVP Client Services, Tonic Design Co.

James Koran

SVP Client Services, Tonic Design Co.

Over the past 10 years, James has honed his skills setting digital strategy for brands across multiple industry verticals including: American Red Cross, Johnson & Johnson, CertainTeed, Abercrombie & Fitch, Rodale Press, Hachette Book Group, Walgreens, Sentara Healthcare, Verizon, GSK, and more. He blends a high-energy leadership style with a proven ability to envision, evangelize and operationalize digital strategy at all levels within an organization. Comfortable at the intersection of digital and business, James' grasp of key trends in technology and experience design allows him to effectively lead teams throughout all phases of the digital product life-cycle including requirements definition, design, development, launch, and optimization. James is a father of 3 boys, an avid reader, basketball player, and a gamer living in Bucks County, PA.

Kevin Cornish

Founder, Conversive

Kevin Cornish

Founder, Conversive

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Kevin Cornish is a New York City-based film director and founder of Conversive with credits directing and producing video for Taylor Swift, Lindsey Sterling, AMC's The Walking Dead, the Award Winning independent production, Fall in Love, Netflix' 13 Reasons Why "Talk to the Reasons" and many more.

Tim Woods

Web Reengineering Project Lead, U.S. Geological Survey

Tim Woods

Web Reengineering Project Lead, U.S. Geological Survey

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As web re-engineering project lead for the U.S. Geological Survey, Mr. Wood led a team that was responsible for making a vast amount of scientific data and research easily accessible and searchable for the general public through an agency-wide website. He worked with executive leadership to define the vision and business needs of the new system, unit stakeholders and end users across multiple USGS regions and offices, and, lead a user-centric design and agile software development team to deliver on a very aggressive project timeline. Mr. Woods delivered a system that provides a forward-thinking approach that not only makes science provided by USGS easily accessible and searchable to the public but also uses advanced technical solutions for keeping content updated.

Brian Lacey

CEO, Mobomo LLC

Brian Lacey

CEO, Mobomo LLC

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"Brian Lacey was named CEO of Mobomo in April of 2015, since the company has grown around 50% in revenue and 50% in employee growth each year. Under his leadership he has led Mobomo to being named to the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies (2015,2016), Best Places to Work (2016), Webby Award (2016), Muse Creative Award(2016), DCA Live Media(2016), Top website and mobile developer by Clutch (2015, 2016). Brian serves as a thought leader in the industry recently being named as an industry chair to Advanced Technology Academic Research Center. He received a double B.A. in Economics and Psychology from Claremont McKenna College."

Zvi Topol

Senior Data Scientist, Stanley Black & Decker, Inc.

Zvi Topol

Senior Data Scientist, Stanley Black & Decker, Inc.

Zvi has been working as a data scientist in a few vertical industries, including media and marketing analytics. Some of the projects he worked on have been in the space of machine learning, chat bots and voice interfaces. He is a graduate of statistics department at Columbia University.

Justin Jeffress

Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon

Justin Jeffress

Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon

Justin Jeffress is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Alexa, and he serves developers building voice-first experiences as an evangelist and mentor. He has over 9 years experience in backend development. For insights into Alexa Skills Kit and voice design follow him at @SleepyDeveloper.

Alex Kaplunovich

CTO, Advanced Technology Experts

Alex Kaplunovich

CTO, Advanced Technology Experts

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"Alex Kaplunovich is a well-established entrepreneur and a technology leader. He is an expert in evolving technologies and an AWS Certified solutions architect. His expertise lies in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Serverless Architectures, Data Analytics and Databases. As a CTO of Advanced Technology Experts, Alex manages development of multiple innovative products, improves overall quality and reliability of software systems, ensuring that best practices and most efficient architectures are implemented using the best technologies available. He received his B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1994 and 1997 respectively. Presently, Mr. Kaplunovich is finishing his PhD. In Computer Science. Mr. Kaplunovich has published numerous papers in prestigious refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings and presented at the prestigious industry and academic conferences in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning and Serverless Architectures. Alex has a wife and four children."

Amit Jotwani

Developer Evangelist, Amazon Alexa

Amit Jotwani

Developer Evangelist, Amazon Alexa

Amit is an Alexa AI & Machine Learning Evangelist at Amazon. His role involves inspiring and helping developers build incredible voice experiences using Alexa - the voice service that powers groundbreaking Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. Amit is passionate about beautiful design and elegant code. He's also an ice cream craver, cricket fanatic, and a chai latte addict. By day you can find him at his desk cooking up beautiful Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. By night, he loves catching up on the re-runs of Seinfeld.

Letha McLaren

VP of Products, CloudCar

Letha McLaren

VP of Products, CloudCar

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Letha recently joined CloudCar, a Silicon Valley-based start-up that develops a comprehensive automotive platform delivering cloud based solutions to OEMs. As an IoT veteran with more than 20 years of diverse marketing, product development and business leadership experience in various internet-of-things markets, Letha is driving the company’s product strategy and execution. Prior to CloudCar, Letha served as Chief Marketing Officer & VP, Products at Icontrol Networks, where she led the product investments and corresponding marketing strategies to grow revenue and deliver compelling customer experiences in the emerging connected home market. Before joining Icontrol Networks, Letha was the General Manager of global deployments for Energy Management and Advanced Applications at Landis+Gyr, a leading smart metering and energy management solutions provider. Letha has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Southern Tech in Marietta, GA and a Global MBA from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA.

Matt Quinn

VP of Software Development, Audible, Inc.

Matt Quinn

VP of Software Development, Audible, Inc.

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Heidi Culbertson

Co-Founder & CEO, Marvee LLC

Heidi Culbertson

Co-Founder & CEO, Marvee LLC

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Heidi Culbertson is co-founder and CEO of Marvee, a voice-first platform for older adults and the family and care communities that surround them. Ms Culbertson brings a cross-discipline background in emerging tech (Wireless, Mobile, and IoT), to lead at the forefront of voice-first technology adoption. Heidi presented as a finalist at the 2016 Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit, and AARP's Innovation@50 LivePitch event in 2017. Ms. Culbertson is also in demand as a Voice-First Consultant and Speaker, most recently speaking at the What's Next Boomer Summit in San Francisco on "The Future of Voice First Technology and Older Adults"

Alex Papanicolaou

Co-Owner, Systems Integrator, Poseidon Systems, Inc.

Alex Papanicolaou

Co-Owner, Systems Integrator, Poseidon Systems, Inc.

As an IT-consultant, Alex Papanicolaou began realizing that IoT was becoming a reality in people's residences and that smart homes and connected devices would need one hub to be effective. Today he is a co-owner of Poseidon Systems, Inc. in Washington, DC, which has gone from working to provide federal agency IT solutions to delivering the IoT solutions for every homeowner that wants to make their home smart. His large-scale experience has been applied to hundreds of smart home customers in the DC area and he's here to tell you more about the real "smart" world and how voice has evolved in everyone's family room.

Ken Sakal

Founder, CEO, Vohesu

Ken Sakal

Founder, CEO, Vohesu

Ken Sakal is the Founder and CEO of Vohesu, a “Voice First” digital transformation company focused on bringing our natural form of communication (voice) into our daily interaction with technology. Vohesu's Diagnosis Navigation Platform helps Healthcare providers who want to reduce healthcare costs by improving patient health literacy and health lifestyle, where and when patients need it, at home or on the go, all via voice. Ken a 20+ year cancer survivor is passionate about improving the lives of patients living with chronic diseases.

Joshua Wies

CEO, Agewell Biometrics US, Inc.

Joshua Wies

CEO, Agewell Biometrics US, Inc.

Joshua Wies has lectured internationally as a researcher in the field of physical therapy rehabilitation and has applied his clinical expertise to the development of the first commercially available fall prediction and prevention platform, Equilibrium, currently being used in Agewell Biometrics' beta pilot program around the country. Equilibrium Pro is currently being used by professional care providers working with older adults and Equilibrium Home will soon be available for consumers to support aging in place.

Kevin Lenane

Co-Founder, Conversive

Kevin Lenane

Co-Founder, Conversive

Kevin is currently the co-founder of Conversive, a face-to-face conversation engine. He is the former CEO of Veenome which, after raising $2.5M in capital and leading the video adtech space, was acquired by Integral Ad Science in March of 2015. It was a major platform enhancement for Integral in that it positioned the video product as a clear market leader. Before starting Veenome in 2011, Kevin was the legal key in the acquisition of PointAbout by Three Pillar Global while leading their business development group. Kevin is the veteran of four acquisitions in his young career. Veenome won many accolades during its four years in operation including The Paley Center's Media Startup of the Year Award, the BB&T MidAtlantic Startup of the Year and was voted as one of the Hottest Startups of 2012 at SXSW. Kevin has been recognized with a variety of CEO and leadership awards.

Bernard Brafman

VP of Business Development, Sensory

Bernard Brafman

VP of Business Development, Sensory

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"Bernard Brafman, Vice President of Business Development at Sensory Inc. Bernard Brafman is Vice President of Business Development for Sensory Inc., responsible for strategic business partnerships. He received his MSEE from Stanford University and has since been involved in various well known high technology companies including programmable logic and ASIC ICs, and speech recognition. Outside of work, he can usually be found in the local lap pool."

Mitul Tiwari

CTO, Passage AI

Mitul Tiwari

CTO, Passage AI

"Mitul Tiwari is the CTO and Co-founder of Passage AI. His expertise lies in building data driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems such as “People You May Know” and “Related Searches.” Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) as a Lead Member of Technical Staff, where he worked on web-scale document and query categorization, and its application to vertical search, personalized newspaper, and tweets classification. Mitul Tiwari earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His interests include natural language processing, data science, recommender systems, machine learning, and scalable systems. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as KDD, WWW, VLDB, SIGIR, and CIKM."

Jon Nemargut

Senior UX Designer, SAS

Jon Nemargut

Senior UX Designer, SAS

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Jon Nemargut is a User Experience Designer at SAS with a design speciality in NLG and NLI. SAS develops and markets a suite of analytics software which helps access, manage, analyze and report on data to aid in decision-making. Jon is passionate about user research, usability testing, and prototyping. He has a strong affinity toward high fidelity prototypes.

Doug Robinson

CEO & Founder, Fresh Digital Group

Doug Robinson

CEO & Founder, Fresh Digital Group

"Doug Robinson is the CEO of FreshDigitalGroup, a creative collective based in NYC. For the past 15 years Doug has constantly been innovating and pushing the envelope when it comes to blending creativity and technology to create new services. He has a proven track record of success generating new revenue streams in sports, auto, travel, healthcare, retail and financial services verticals. Currently, FRSH is a leader in voice and has created over 700 skills and actions among Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana for various nonprofits and brands, including UNICEF, ESPN, BMW, and Toys R Us. Prior to FreshDigitalGroup, Doug served as the VP of Strategy at MEDL Mobile. He was also a Director of Creative & Strategy at Ansible. For over a decade, he’s helped marketers develop optimized digital campaigns to boost meaningful connections with their consumers. In an industry populated by an alphabet soup of M.B.A.s and Ph.Ds, Doug is a throwback to the dying breed of self-made entrepreneur."

Josh Sigel

COO, Innit Inc.

Josh Sigel

COO, Innit Inc.

"Josh Sigel is an internationally recognized thought leader and innovator in the food technology, retail food, and consumer products distribution industries. With over 15 years of senior level technology and operations leadership experience, Josh has worked with some of the nation's largest retailers and distributors leading transformational technology initiatives. He is currently the COO of Innit, an ""Eating Technology"" company where he leads the company developing the world's first platform for the connected kitchen. A leading authority on food omni-commerce, he is passionate about the future of the connected kitchen and believes continued innovation in this space will help people eat and live better. Sigel draws on his experience as CIO of Natural Markets Food Group (""NMFG""), an operator of retail food and food service stores throughout North America, National Vice President of Digital Media at United Natural Foods [NASDAQ: UNFI], the largest organic and natural food distributor in North America, and with other organizations as he advises and invests in a number of food technology start-ups. Josh has been a featured speaker at the National Retail Federation's Annual Convention and Expo, ThoughtWorks Live Europe, The Online Retailer Conference & eCommerce Expo in Australia, The Shanghai Franchise Retail Industry Summit and Asia Retail Innovation Summit in China, and ParadigmShift in the US."

Yelena Lyudmilova

Assistant Director of Education and Computing Technology, Essex County College

Yelena Lyudmilova

Assistant Director of Education and Computing Technology, Essex County College

Yelena has been working in the higher education field since 2010, with extensive experience in user services, instructional technologies, and technology management. Most recently, she presented at a special needs conference, focusing on the roles and responsibilities instructors have when using third party resources, as well as the digital citizenship skills students need (students with IEPs) to transition into higher education environments. She is also a member of a task force charged with developing guidelines for building in inclusiveness in multi-modal classroom environments. The task force is an effort on the part of a national instructional technology council charged with providing professional development, research and best practices in educational technology.

Pat Higbie

CEO / co-founder, XAPPmedia

Pat Higbie

CEO / co-founder, XAPPmedia

Pat Higbie is an entrepreneur with a career of building technology firms from the ground up. He began working in voice technology in 2008 at Xtone and founded XAPPmedia in 2012. XAPPmedia has built, deployed and manages over 800 voice apps that operate through Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana voice assistants for leading national brands and media companies. Earlier in his career, Pat founded and served as CEO of DataFocus, a pioneer in data modeling and relational data base design. That business was split and acquired by CIBER and PTC. Pat received a BS in Civil Engineering with High Honors from the U. S. Coast Guard Academy and an MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois where he was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Dr. Tom Montelione

Founder and CTO, Agile Audio Dashboards

Dr. Tom Montelione

Founder and CTO, Agile Audio Dashboards

In addition to his founder/CTO role at Agile Audio Dashboards, Tom serves as the president of Vertex Software, Inc., in Wooster, OH, since 1995. He has functioned as business analyst, programmer and supervisor for various IT project. Major clients have included Prescription Supply, Northwood, OH, Auburn Pharmaceuticals, Troy, MI, Genetco Inc, Ronkonkoma, NY, Wulff Enterprises, N. Canton, OH, Wayne Insurance, Wooster, OH. Programming languages utilized included C#, Visual Basic, Visual Foxpro, PHP, JavaScript. Developed Crossfire for the Web, CRM for Fire Departments and integrated NFIRS reporting to FEMA. Tom serves as an adjunct instructor at the College of Wooster and Ashland University where he has taught multiple semesters on Introduction to Computers, Python and C++ on an as-needed basis.

Barg Upender

Founder, Coglide

Barg Upender

Founder, Coglide

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Barg Upender is a serial entrepreneur with a deep passion for building creative products, agile teams, and profitable companies. He specialized in Artificial Intelligence at Cornell University. Currently, he is focused on building the smartest growth platform on the planet, Coglide.

Michael Atkinson

CEO, Orderscape

Michael Atkinson

CEO, Orderscape

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Michael is a restaurant technology investor, entrepreneur and strategic advisor to brands, venture investors, investment banks and technology innovators worldwide. As a serial entrepreneur, former restaurant corporate executive and multi-hyphenate living in Silicon Valley, Michael founded FohBoh.com, inFOH.com and Quikfitapp.com. He is a founder and CEO of Orderscape.com; advisor to bluestartups.com, foodandcity.org and Founder of Roostersbot.com, a fully autonomous food-maker robot being developed for release in 2019. As a passionate advocate for transformative food and restaurant technologies, Michael helps restaurant brands and early-stage food and restaurant technology companies in the areas of corporate development, corporate finance, strategy, product development and resource integration and is a frequent blogger and speaker on automation and data application in the restaurant industry.

Elizabeth Barr

Co-Founder, Bev Labs

Elizabeth Barr

Co-Founder, Bev Labs

Elizabeth Barr is co-founder and CEO of Bev Labs, a creative voice agency in Greenville, SC. Elizabeth was an award-winning newspaper journalist with the Buffalo News before radically changing gears at the Iron Yard, a coding bootcamp. Two years later, her husband did a similar 180, leaving a career as a chef and restaurant owner to become a back-end developer. Together they ended up founding Bev Labs to bring the transformational power of AI, IoT, and voice UI to leading brands in the hospitality, retail, media, and fitness and wellness spaces.

Dario Rivera

Healthcare Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Dario Rivera

Healthcare Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Dario Rivera is a 20-year veteran of Healthcare Technical Consultancy working with numerous Healthcare and Life Sciences Organizations. Five years with Amazon WebServices has fueled Dario's passion for evangelizing how technology is and can be used in improving the Health and Happiness of humankind. Dario tirelessly works with Health Non-Profits, Startups, Pharmaceuticals, and Hospitals to raise awareness on adopting Innovation Thinking and Cloud Technology to truly transform the staus-quo execution of Healthcare and Life Sciences Research.

Scott Edgar

CTO, Aris MD Inc.

Scott Edgar

CTO, Aris MD Inc.

Scott Edgar was a computer prodigy as a child, and started programming at the age of 4. He learned programming alongside his first language. He speaks it intuitively, fluently, and articulately. There isn't anything he can't build. He has a love and talent for programming that mirrors a great artist. His talent for building beautiful precise algorithms and software has an eloquence. It has led to the success of his past start-ups. His last start-up selling to a major Silicon Valley tech giant along with his code and patents. Scott is uniquely able to bring to life ideas that were previously science fiction. His current startup, Aris MD, is pioneering Augmented and Virtual Reality in the medical space, including visualization, diagnosis and artificial intelligence.

Deborah Dahl

Principal, Conversational Technologies

Deborah Dahl

Principal, Conversational Technologies

Dr. Deborah Dahl is the Principal at Conversational Technologies, where she assists her clients in developing speech product strategies and in designing innovative applications of speech technology. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and is the editor of the 2017 book, "Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Toward Natural User Interfaces to Everything". Dr. Dahl received Speech Luminary Awards in 2012 and 2014 from Speech Technology Magazine.

Kartik Poddar

SVP and Business Head, Haptik

Kartik Poddar

SVP and Business Head, Haptik

"Kartik has over 10 years of experience in product management and marketing with companies like Komli Media and Microsoft. Before joining Haptik, Kartik co-founded an offline content distribution venture, Fropcorn where he led the Product, Business development and Content acquisition efforts for the company. At Haptik, Kartik leads the Enterprise solutions vertical and is responsible for the overall growth strategy of the company. He is passionate about the art of improv comedy and is an active member of Kaamedy Inc, India's leading improv comedy troupe."

William Mayo

CEO/Founder, SpokenLayer c\o Will Mayo

William Mayo

CEO/Founder, SpokenLayer c\o Will Mayo

"Will Mayo founded SpokenLayer to power media and brands on voice platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. Clients include Oath, Univision, Gannett, McClatchy, Hearst, GateHouse Media, Medium, A+E, and hundreds more. SpokenLayer is backed by visionary investors like The Guardian, Matter, Betaworks, Graham Holdings, North Base Media, and more. Previously, Will worked at Goldman Sachs and Intel and earned a masters in Electrical Engineering and Ergonomics from Lehigh University."

Danny Isserles

Head of NY HQ, Temi the Personal Robot

Danny Isserles

Head of NY HQ, Temi the Personal Robot

Currently, Danny is head of the New York City headquarters for Temi, the first, truly intelligent mobile personal robot. He will be demonstrating Temi's interactive features and highlighting the revolutionary autonomous navigation system in a presentation that all sorts of crowds, from regular visitors to top tech specialists, have found both fascinating and entertaining.

Tahsim Ahmed

Tahsim Ahmed

Wendy Johansson

VP of UX, Wizeline

Wendy Johansson

VP of UX, Wizeline

Wendy Johansson leads the user-centric design strategy of Wizeline’s chatbot platform. She manages the team of UX designers who work on all design and conversational aspects of chatbots and Alexa skills we build. With over a decade of Silicon Valley product experience, she has built both B2B and B2C products and services with international teams. Prior to Wizeline, she led the distributed UX teams at Ooyala, a video technology company, and at AppNexus, a leading advertising technology company.

Omar Javaid

Chief Product Officer, Vonage

Omar Javaid

Chief Product Officer, Vonage

"Omar Javaid joined Vonage in July 2015 as Chief Product Officer. Mr. Javaid is responsible for the Company's overall product strategy. Mr. Javaid has more than 20 years of experience creating award-winning products in the technology industry with a focus on telecommunications, media and web product development. Prior to joining Vonage, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Discovery and Cloud Platforms for Rovi Corporation, a cloud-based entertainment discovery company. Prior to Rovi, Mr. Javaid held positions as Vice President and General Manager of Commercial Mobility, and Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for Hewlett-Packard. He has also held executive positions at Motorola Mobility and Qualcomm, Inc. An entrepreneur, Mr. Javaid founded and led two successful technology startups. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan."

Guy Tonye

Software engineer, Connected Lab

Guy Tonye

Software engineer, Connected Lab

Guy has been around the world -- Cameroon, France, the United States, Canada -- but has always carried with him a passion for technology, which he is using both in his daily tasks as a software engineer and during his free time when he is tinkering with software and hardware to solve real life problems.

Ashvin Naik

Co-Founder, Stealth Mode Startup

Ashvin Naik

Co-Founder, Stealth Mode Startup

"Since 2016, Ashvin has been the co-founder of a stealth startup on a mission to build fantastic conversational experiences to interact with technology. He has developed a conversational experience design framework, and in the process created a course to teach others how to advance conversations. Previously, he honed his skills in Washington State as head of Marketing and Product management for Dell EMC's cloud storage infrastructure business; served as co-founder & CEO of Mandovi Corp, a readiness and enablement services business serving Microsoft, Amazon, VMware and Intel; and was rapidly promoted through a series of positions at Microsoft. Ashvin received his MBA from the Michael G. Foster school of business at the University of Washington in Seattle. "

Brandon Kaplan

CEO, Skilled Creative

Brandon Kaplan

CEO, Skilled Creative

Brandon Kaplan is the Founder of SKILLED, an emerging technology creative agency, headquartered in NYC. SKILLED develops best in class conversational experiences for Fortune 500 brands, and has developed the proprietary SKILLSET platform, allowing partners to adjust voice content with agility and without coding.

Polina Cherkashyna

Product Manager, Cherkashyna

Polina Cherkashyna

Product Manager, Cherkashyna

"Polina is a strategist, designer, and thought leader focused on voice-first products, Machine Learning and Product Delivery craftsmanship. She is interested in creating novel products and meaningful experiences that help businesses grow and simultaneously inspire, engage and empower users. As co-founder of Voice Tech TO Polina dedicates herself to growing and supporting the community of practitioners, who are interested in voice and helps develop plays and tactics to ensure successful voice-first product delivery."

Allan Hoving

Founder, PodPoster LLC

Allan Hoving

Founder, PodPoster LLC

"Allan Hoving has held content and marketing roles at Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, MediaPost, Verve Mobile, and others. His development projects include PodPoster.com, PDFchecker.com, and C-Cart, an online ad unit that enables a consumer to buy directly from the ad. Allan graduated with honors from Columbia College and earned a Master's in Interactive Communications from Quinnipiac University."

Joshua Montgomery

CEO, Mycroft AI

Joshua Montgomery

CEO, Mycroft AI

"Joshua Montgomery, CEO One of the few entrepreneurs in the US to build a gigabit fiber network from scratch, Joshua is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience. The ISP he built, Wicked Broadband, featured in Wired and Forbes is a testament of net neutrality support and underlying principles long before they became a buzz phrase. Joshua is an Air Force Captain, an aerospace engineer, and a hacker at heart. He oversees all aspects of Mycroft and is a firm supporter of the open source movement committed to an open future for AI."

Garrick Gauch

Co-Founder/Partner, MadValley Labs

Garrick Gauch

Co-Founder/Partner, MadValley Labs

Garrick is an accomplished mobile technology executive with extensive experience with consumer brands on all aspects of mobile marketing and channel deployments, including; mobile-first strategy, UX design thinking, emerging tech innovation, ecosystem integration, and user analytics and retention. As co-founder and partner of MadValley Labs, Garrick seeks to combine elements of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley - to support brands with the emerging tools of digital storytelling.

Nhan Tran

Head of Natural Language Analytics, Fractal Industries

Nhan Tran

Head of Natural Language Analytics, Fractal Industries

"Nhan Tran’s passion and expertise lie in numerical analysis and computational mathematics. He earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at Kansas State University, where he researched fast algorithms for solving wave scattering and integral equations. At Fractal Industries, Nhan researches information extraction, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, big data analytics, and knowledge base construction to support the building of core components and services for the first Human-AI operating system, Fractal | OS™."

Kerry Evers

Co-President and CEO, Pro-Change Behavior Systems, Inc.

Kerry Evers

Co-President and CEO, Pro-Change Behavior Systems, Inc.

"Kerry E. Evers, Ph.D., is Co-President and CEO of Pro-Change Behavior Systems, Inc. She leads projects focusing on the development and dissemination of tailored interventions for various audiences and behaviors, methods to increase their impact, and approaches for integrating them into population-based systems. Named one of Rhode Island’s top “40 Under Forty” business people, Kerry obtained Pro-Change’s first SBIR funding from NIH in 1998, and has been integral in the awarding and implementation of many of Pro-Change’s corporate contracts. She is currently the Principal Investigator on $2.5 million of SBIR contracts with the National Institutes of Health. A prolific publisher and international public speaker, Kerry was selected by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense as one of 50 leaders from across the country to participate in the 76th Joint Civilian Orientation Conference. She is adjunct faculty at URI and actively involved in a variety of professional societies and several boards of local non-profits."

Derek Roberti

VP Technology, North America, Cognigy, Inc.

Derek Roberti

VP Technology, North America, Cognigy, Inc.

Derek has spent the last 15 years working with Marketing Technology in the Enterprise. Formerly with Sitecore, recognized by Gartner as a Digital Experience leader, Derek has led customer-facing technical teams supporting businesses around the globe. Derek started with Cognigy, Inc. in 2018 to bring conversational AI to the North American market.

John Kelvie

Founder and CEO, Bespoken

John Kelvie

Founder and CEO, Bespoken

"John is the founder and CEO of Bespoken, the leaders in testing and monitoring for voice apps. The company has more than 2,000 developers using its software, and more than 1,000 apps being monitored. Bespoken is a recognized partner of Amazon and Google, and its team presents frequently at conferences, meetups, and webinars. Team members love to talk about all things voice, and are enthusiastic and active participants within the community. Prior to Bespoken, John worked for more than ten years in IoT and speech recognition. This experience informs Bespoken's product line and approach to the exciting, fast-growing voice space."

Robert Bruchhardt

Senior Software Engineer, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America

Robert Bruchhardt

Senior Software Engineer, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America

Robert has been working in the connected car area since 2014 and is a Software Engineer at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America based in Sunnyvale, CA. He used to be a Scrum Product Owner for web frontend development before focusing on the connection of IoT and mobility use cases. On this quest, he is part of the engineering team who integrates voice assistants with connected car interfaces to enhance vehicle interaction. He is passionate about meaningful speech applications and finding the “everyday” use cases in the mobility sector.

Rob Lamberson

Director, Analytics, Reprise

Rob Lamberson

Director, Analytics, Reprise

Rob is an analyst, visualization maven, and thought leader who’s continued to sharpen his analytics chops as a member of the IPG Mediabrands team for the past seven years. He serves as the Head of Analytics at Reprise and brings 12 years of media agency analytics expertise across all digital media channels and currently leads bot measurement strategies for the agency. He has served high-profile clients, including The Home Depot, Verizon, Kia, and ExxonMobil. Rob has developed and refined bot measurement plans across automotive, pharmaceutical, and food and beverage spaces, amongst others.

Daniel Atwood

Senior Product Strategist, WillowTree, Inc.

Daniel Atwood

Senior Product Strategist, WillowTree, Inc.

Daniel is a Senior Product Strategist at WillowTree in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he works with Fortune 500 clients to identify opportunities in mobile, voice and emerging tech.

Konstantin Simonchik

Chief Science Officer, ID R&D

Konstantin Simonchik

Chief Science Officer, ID R&D

Konstantin is the Chief Science Officer of ID R&D and has his doctorate in Computer Science and Mathematics. He has more than 30 leading peer reviewed scientific publications devoted to speaker recognition and anti-spoofing topics, numerous recognitions and awards from IEEE and ASVspoof, along with winning the prestigious NIST biometric evaluation.

Adam Edwards

Head of SEO, Reprise

Adam Edwards

Head of SEO, Reprise

Adam Edwards is the Head of SEO at Reprise and has led the US SEO department since 2012, negotiating new partnerships and pioneering new capabilities ranging from site search optimization to machine learning. Since then, our US organic team has grown from its roots in New York to include five more cities across the country and earned awards and commendations on their use of content and voice search. Adam also led SEO practices at two past agencies, the most recent being leading social media agency Converseon.

Josef Hapli

Founder & CEO, Ether

Josef Hapli

Founder & CEO, Ether

"Digital industry leader and entrepreneur, Josef Hapli is the founder and CEO of Ether, a digital agency that creates unforgettable web, mobile, and marketing experiences. With experience in advertising, marketing, and consulting, Josef has delivered award-winning work across various media for clients including Google, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Gallup, Healthcare.gov, and more. He specializes in brand storytelling and helping clients tackle their biggest problems with a “360” approach. Josef has Bachelors degrees in Communications and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland, College Park. Supporting the inclusion of STEM studies and women in tech, Josef incorporates an educational approach into his work and mentorship. His family are native Washingtonians, avid travelers, and wine enthusiasts."

Walter Quesada

Conversational Systems Lead, Applied Research Lab, PwC

Walter Quesada

Conversational Systems Lead, Applied Research Lab, PwC

Walt is a Software Engineer and Technologist with over 20 years experience architecting and developing solutions for companies of all sizes. He currently serves as the Conversational Systems Lead at the PwC Applied Research Lab where he focuses on creating a more conversational future with voice and chat bots. He is also an Amazon Alexa Champion, O’Reilly author with a book titled “Programming Voice Interfaces," as well as a Pluralsight instructor with two courses titled, “Developing Alexa Skills for Amazon Echo” and “Creating Voice and Chatbots that Work Everywhere." He also currently serves on the advisory board for startup called Voceio that’s bringing the conversational AI experience to the hospitality industry. In addition, Walt is a speaker and co-organizer for the South Florida Emerging Technology Group and also a speaker at South Florida Code Camp at Nova Southeastern University.

Vladimir Castillo

President, Co-Founder, xReach.io

Vladimir Castillo

President, Co-Founder, xReach.io

" Vladimir has spent over 20 years in the areas of strategy, marketing, business growth, and optimizing the patient/customer experience. His specialties include Digital & Multi-Channel marketing, Voice AI, Life Science Marketing, Innovation and Advanced Analytics. He cofounded xReach.io, a company focused on better engaging healthcare stakeholders by integrating the latest advances in voice-enabled technologies and speech synthesis coupled with its own (patent pending) artificial intelligence technology in healthcare ontology. Vladimir serves as a Strategic Advisor and Board Member of Asentech, a company focused on strategy, research and digital / technology development and execution within the Life Sciences and Media Publishing industries. Previously, Vladimir co-founded and served as the Chief Marketing Officer for The Encima Group (now Indegene Encima), a business analytics consulting company listed as one of the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America - for four years in a row. His partnership approach has helped dozens of brands across multiple specialties achieve growth above and beyond expectations. This success has been across multiple audiences and customer types such as health care providers, consumers, patients, caregivers, organization and hospital executives, etc. Vladimir has an MBA in Marketing and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Rutgers University. "

Crispin Reedy

Director, UX, Versay Solutions

Crispin Reedy

Director, UX, Versay Solutions

Crispin Reedy is a Voice User Experience designer and usability professional with over 10 years of front-line design, speech usability, and tuning experience across a variety of industries, including financial, telecommunications, health care and transportation. She is interested helping teams make excellent design decisions and how we can best leverage real-world data to achieve those goals. She has previously spoken at SpeechTEK, UXPA International, Dallas Tech Fest, Dallas Startup Week and Big Design Conference, and is currently serving as President of the Association for Voice Interaction Design.

Tim Bettridge

Product Designer, Connected Lab

Tim Bettridge

Product Designer, Connected Lab

A trained product designer and technologist, Tim specializes in conducting upfront user research to generate insights and find human-centred solutions. Tim is a true innovator, futurist and product visionary, he uses his foresight to spot opportunities and then guides design teams through extensive validation and research processes in order to validate the hypotheses and ensure product success while bringing exciting and intuitive experiences to users.

Chris Geison

Senior UX Researcher, Answer Lab

Chris Geison

Senior UX Researcher, Answer Lab

Chris Geison is a UX Researcher at AnswerLab where he leads research to help fortune 500 clients identify and prioritize insights that improve their business results. Drawing from his experience in digital strategy at Charles Schwab and a fascination with motivation and change honed working in behavioral health, Chris has led studies ranging from the role of emerging technologies in the future of banking to the behavioral effectiveness of workspaces, with a particular focus on conversational interfaces. A graduate of Brown University, Chris lives in San Francisco with an imaginary panther named Winston.

Ramya Palacholla

Dr. Palacholla has extensive training in Medicine, Public Health and Digital Health analytics and has successfully contributed to design, implementation and rigorous evaluation of several digital health programs. Dr. Palacholla’s goal of improving access to high quality equitable healthcare, promoting wellness, preventing diseases and limiting the complications of chronic diseases motivated her to exploit the ubiquity of modern technologies to find innovative means of engaging patients. Her research interests include health outcomes research, systematic literature reviews/ meta-analysis, study design, and data analytics with a focus on building patient self-management and improving patient-physician communication and the efficiency of clinical workflow. She has designed several pilot studies and randomized controlled trials focused on evaluating personal health solutions, mobile phone applications, tele-monitoring programs in addition to performing for these projects. Currently, she is working as a Scientist in the Research, Analytics & Algorithm Science team at Partners HealthCare Connected Health Innovation. She also a faculty appointment at the Harvard Medical School.

Ami Berger

Co-Founder/CTO, Voiceter Pro LLC

Ami Berger

Co-Founder/CTO, Voiceter Pro LLC

A technology geek with a love of voice-driven technology, Voiceter Pro Chief Technology Officer Ami Berger recognized very early on the potential for conversational interactions with artificial intelligence devices. Voiceter Pro was born from a vision of an app that would allow consumers to ask Amazon’s Alexa to find them the home of their dreams. This vision became the Real Estate Skill, which was launched in early December 2016. Since then they have launched some 20 other skills across the real estate space.

Miguel Berger

Co-Founder/CEO, Voiceter Pro LLC

Miguel Berger

Co-Founder/CEO, Voiceter Pro LLC

Co-Founder/CEO With more than 30 years experience in the real estate industry, Miguel is the owner/broker of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Tech Valley. He founded the successful company as an independent brokerage, recognizing the value of the Tech Valley name in New York State's Capital Region. The successful firm was eventually courted by Better Homes and Gardens to give that strong presence in the state's capital . In addition to holding several advanced real estate designations, Miguel has been a local REALTOR® and multiple listing service president. He is recognized nationally as an industry leader and forward thinking business man with a love of technology.

Omar Tawakol

CEO & Founder, Voicera

Omar Tawakol

CEO & Founder, Voicera

Omar is the brains behind BlueKai, which he sold to Oracle to become the Oracle Data Cloud, the world's largest consumer data marketplace that powered 97 of the top 100 U.S. marketers. After leading the team at Oracle for several years, Omar is now focused on bringing artificial intelligence to the workplace as the CEO & Founder of Voicera. He and his team are building Eva, an enterprise voice assistant that partners with companies like Cisco WebEx, BlueJeans, Slack and Salesforce to leverage AI and enterprise data to make meetings more productive and help people become more efficient. He earned an MS in computer science from Stanford and a BS from MIT.

Rachel Batish

CRO, Conversation.one

Rachel Batish

CRO, Conversation.one

Rachel is the co-Founder and CRO of Conversation.one, the build-once-deploy-everywhere-platform for conversational apps, which leverages machine learning to maximize the interaction between people and devices. She is responsible for the company's sales and marketing strategies and is actively involved in the product's roadmap. Rachel has published several online articles on voice and chat UX and the importance of AI in building conversational applications. Her book on Chat and Voice design will be published by PACKT Publishing House in July 2018. Rachel has a BA in Political Science and an MA in International Relations.

Joseph Dangelmaier

Lead IVR Engineer, Wolters Kluwer Health

Joseph Dangelmaier

Lead IVR Engineer, Wolters Kluwer Health

Joseph Dangelmaier is the Lead IVR Developer at Emmi, part of Wolters Kluwer Health. He is a certified AWS and VoiceXML developer and has been developing voice applications in the healthcare space for over 13 years.

Jochen Emig

Co-founder & CEO, ONSEI GmbH

Jochen Emig

Co-founder & CEO, ONSEI GmbH

Jochen Emig is the Co-founder and CEO of ONSEI GmbH, an Agency that designs, builds and maintains conversational interfaces for companies and their brands. Prior to starting ONSEI in Berlin, Germany, Jochen worked as a developer and technical lead at startups in Japan, Singapore and the US.

Kelly Franznick

Chief Experience Officer, Blink

Kelly Franznick

Chief Experience Officer, Blink

"Kelly is the CxO and co-founder of Blink. He focuses on the future of Blink’s tools, services, and methods while also working on unique project requirements. He is passionate about making our daily interactions with technology more innovative, intuitive, and rewarding. While growing Blink UX from two to over 60 employees, Kelly has worked with hundreds of clients, from tech-sector heavy hitters, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, to startups and nonprofits. He enjoys working on cutting-edge projects in the data visualization, healthcare, and IT spaces. He feels lucky to have contributed to some of the largest and most successful product launches in history. Kelly volunteers his time as an instructor and external adviser for programs at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. His work has been recognized with a number of awards, including several IDSA IDEA awards for design excellence, and he has spoken on the topic of UX at the University of Washington, Convey UX, and the Project Management Institute, to name a few. In 2011, he was featured as “Geek of the Week” from Geek Wire Magazine. "

Beth Ritter-Guth

Director of Instructional Design, Director of American Honors, Director of the Innovation Center, Union County College

Beth Ritter-Guth

Director of Instructional Design, Director of American Honors, Director of the Innovation Center, Union County College

"Beth is the Director of Instructional Design, Director of American Honors, and Director of the Innovation Center at Union County College in Cranford, NJ. Her current work features the Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence programming in addition to ethical hacking, cyber law, gaming, gamification, and the digital humanities. Beth has earned multiple awards for the use of these technologies including the Teacher of the Future award by the National Association of Independent Schools, the Nobel Teacher of Distinction Award, the Campus Leadership Team Award by Campus Technology, and most recently, the 2017 Innovator of the Year by the League of Innovation and the 2017 Leadership & Innovation award from NJEdge. Her work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Magazine, USA Today and America Online. Beth's philosophy is that ""the next war will not be fought with boots on the ground; it will be fought in the underbelly of the internet. Code is the language of peace...let's all do our part to learn it."""

Pierre Quemard

Innovation Principal, Finastra

Pierre Quemard

Innovation Principal, Finastra

Pierre is a technologist journeyman on his path to master craftsmanship in the Financial sector with 10+ years of experience. He has worked on different size and shape financial institutions across the globe from small hedge fund in Hongkong to the biggest sovereign fund in China through multi-billion asset manager in NYC. His responsibilities spanned from pre-sales to customer advocacy through time critical implementation enabling strong understanding of technological challenges in this sector. He has recently positioned his technological acumen towards helping Financial Institution, Integrators, FinTech and Student to all collaborate on an innovative platform.

Nick Schwab

Founder & CEO, Invoked Apps

Nick Schwab

Founder & CEO, Invoked Apps

Nick spends his days as a Senior Software Engineer at Livio (a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company) writing web applications and APIs to enable developers to extend their applications to in-vehicle infotainment systems using SmartDeviceLink. He also has experience leading technical teams at various startups and managing architecture for thousands of databases at a Fortune 500 insurance company. Passionate about a voice-first future, Nick spends his free time developing voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana through his company, Invoked Apps. His work is used by over 1 million voice users every month and he is widely recognized in the voice development community as a leader in cross-platform voice development, scaling voice applications, and voice UX design.

Noriaki Tatsumi

Senior Manager, Divisional Architect, Capital One

Noriaki Tatsumi

Senior Manager, Divisional Architect, Capital One

Noriaki (Nori) is the divisional architect of Center for Machine Learning at Capital One. He leads software and machine learning engineering teams that champion the development of innovative and business value driven projects, products, and platforms. Prior to joining Capital One, Nori was the Director of Engineering at Blackboard and is one of the co-founders of Anax Security.

Mark Pappas

VP, Search Engine Marketing, CMI Media/WPP Health & Wellness

Mark Pappas

VP, Search Engine Marketing, CMI Media/WPP Health & Wellness

Mark Pappas is the vice president of search engine marketing at CMI Media, part of the WPP Health & Wellness network. Mark has over 12 years of experience working in paid search and organic search optimization and social media marketing. He has worked in industries spanning CPG, finance, housing, hospitality/restaurant as well as sporting goods. The past 9 years he has been focusing on pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing with clients ranging from over the counter products to breakthrough immuno oncology treatments.

Adam Marchick

CEO, Alpine.AI

Adam Marchick

CEO, Alpine.AI

Prior to starting Alpine.AI, Adam was the co-founder and CEO of VoiceLabs.co. VoiceLabs.co became the #1 Voice Analytics product for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana - serving over 3,700 Voice Apps and Analyzing over 85M conversations across 16M consumers. Adam was early at Facebook (2008), then started Kahuna. Kahuna defined and led the Mobile Marketing Automation market, raised $60M led by Sequoia Capital, and Adam had the privilege to serve The New York Times, Yelp, Yahoo, Overstock and hundreds of other market leaders as customers. Adam is also the Voice Search expert for Dematteo Research, advising companies on the future of Voice Assistants and Voice Search.

Adam Sabloff

Founder and CEO, VirtualHealth

Adam Sabloff

Founder and CEO, VirtualHealth

"Presently serving as the founder and CEO of VirtualHealth, Adam has worked at the forefront of healthcare transformation for more than a decade, perfecting the technologies that pioneered patient-centered, value-based care. After losing a loved one to a late stage diagnosis, Adam became passionate about improving a system that fails to serve the highest risk populations, especially the disabled, disadvantaged, and elderly. Under Adam's leadership, VirtualHealth has built the leading next-generation platform for care management and population health: a cloud-native ecosystem that incorporates clinical, behavioral, and social data streams to curate a single, complete view of each patient. The platform then combines that whole-person view with highly intelligent and responsive workflows ultimately enabling care teams to react to situations in real time with optimal interventions. Adam’s vision has led to incredible growth for VirtualHealth, including a 1,600 percent growth in monthly revenues, 1,000 percent growth in lives managed, and 10-fold growth in staffing since January 2016. He expanded the client portfolio with forward-thinking organizations WellCare and Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), resulting in nearly 6 million patients being managed by VirtualHealth."

Bob Gold

Clinical Behavioral Technologist, GoMo Health

Bob Gold

Clinical Behavioral Technologist, GoMo Health

Bob Gold is one of the world’s leading behavioral technologists with more than 20 years applied research and development in the behavioral and cognitive science of human engagement focused on motivation and persuasion; with a sub-specialty in digital health applications to human motivation, activation, and resiliency. Bob focuses his energy on recrafting clinical care plans into behaviorally-based remote care coordination, transitions of care, and tele-health patient engagement protocols to achieve a sustainable Population Health business model for health systems, health plans, pharmaceutical companies, and governments. Bob’s proven evidence based methods provide a more personalized, disciplined, and nurturing experience within the framework of a person’s lifestyle and typical day while improving satisfaction and adherence; especially for complex and chronic conditions that include co-morbidities and difficult to navigate patient health journeys.

David Thompson MD

Founder, CEO, Health Navigator, LLC

David Thompson MD

Founder, CEO, Health Navigator, LLC

David Thompson, MD, serves as CEO and chief medical officer for Health Navigator, Inc. Dr. Thompson is the inventor of the Health Navigator Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engine and principal architect of the platform and clinical vocabulary. Dr. Thompson chairs the Health Navigator Medical Review Board. A part-time faculty attending in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Emergency Department, Dr. Thompson also works as an author and partner with Self Care Decisions, LLC and Schmitt-Thompson Clinical Content, LLC. In a collaboration with well-known pediatrician Dr. Barton Schmitt, Dr. Thompson has developed a comprehensive set of telephone triage guidelines that are used in medical call centers and doctors’ offices in the United States and internationally. Prior to working at Northwestern Memorial, Dr. Thompson worked in the MacNeal Hospital Emergency Department, where he served as medical director and chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, and also provided medical direction over the medical call center. He has published numerous research articles and the 4th edition of his book, Adult Telephone Protocols - Office Version, will be published later this year. Dr. Thompson lectures in the areas of telephone triage, medical coding, physician documentation, quality improvement, and patient satisfaction. Dr. Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in engineering from the University of Illinois, where he subsequently earned his medical degree. He is board-certified in both internal medicine and emergency medicine, having completed a dual residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University. Dr. Thompson is a Fellow in the American College of Emergency Physicians

Ted Chan

CareDash

Ted Chan

CareDash

Ted Chan fights every day to make the healthcare experience more transparent and accessible for American patients. CareDash is the web's fastest growing patient review website, and we have our sights set on being #1. Ted created CareDash after noticing two troubling trends on healthcare review sites: healthcare providers serving certain segments of the U.S. population were underrepresented and many existing sites accepted financial compensation in exchange for removal of negative provider feedback. These practices have made access to information about the quality of provider care more difficult for large segments of Americans. CareDash's vision is to create transparency for healthcare consumers, and transforming the patient experience of finding and scheduling a provider. A skilled innovator, strategist and social entrepreneur, Ted has more than ten years of experience in management consulting and information technology solution architecture. He has dedicated his career to utilizing user-friendly digital solutions, data science, and analytics to transform everyday challenges facing consumers. Prior to CareDash, Ted founded Upward Mobility, a leader in mobile education delivery with more than 150 apps across six platforms, including PracticeQuiz.com (one of the world's most popular free test prep sites) and DynamicPath.com. Upward Mobility provides cost-effective educational materials to over 3 million users a year. Ted has also served as a management consultant with Cartesian, advising C-level executives on strategy in the telecom, media and technology space.

Joan Palmiter Bajorek

Principal Investigator & Speech Technologist, ImmerseMe

Joan Palmiter Bajorek

Principal Investigator & Speech Technologist, ImmerseMe

Joan Palmiter Bajorek is a speech technologist and PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona. Exploring virtual reality and speech technology in EdTech, she is the Principal Investigator of an international team in collaboration with ImmerseMe and Lingt. Presenting at national and international conferences, Bajorek’s work explores EdTech, user experiences with technology, and data-driven education. She holds a MA in Linguistics from the University of California, Davis.

Oren Jacob

CoFounder, PullString

Oren Jacob

CoFounder, PullString

Oren Jacob helped found PullString and has been its CEO for seven years, helping lead the field of computer conversation. Prior to that, Oren was an Entrepreneur in Residence at August Capital. A filmmaker and technologist, he spent more than 20 years at Pixar, most recently as Chief Technical Officer and Director of the Studio Tools group. His feature film credits include Toy Story and Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, and Supervising Technical Director for Finding Nemo. Oren has also helped teach the "Lean Launchpad" classes with Steve Blank at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, and for the NSF as well as teach Animated Short Film at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He has also been an invited speaker at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google I/O, Microsoft /Build, SXSW, Sundance, ComicCon, and the NY ToyFair.

Nathan Treloar

President, Orbita Inc.

Nathan Treloar

President, Orbita Inc.

Nathan Treloar has served in executive leadership roles in several successful high growth software companies. In his current initiative, Orbita, he focuses on SaaS opportunities for technologies that enable conversational user experiences. Orbita provides digital solutions for healthcare that leverage next-generation voice assistant and AI technologies to vastly improve remote patient monitoring, clinical education, and care coordination, and research. The Orbita platform is used by developers to enable digital and conversational healthcare solutions that improve outcomes, reduce costs, and minimize risks for patients with chronic or post-acute healthcare needs. Previously, Nathan held key executive positions at FAST Search, Microsoft, RAMP, and, Ektron. He is a respected expert and speaker on consumer IoT trends, search, text and data mining, content management, and knowledge management and has advised hundreds of the world’s largest companies and government agencies on their applications.

Peter Voss

Founder/ CEO, Aigo.ai Inc

Peter Voss

Founder/ CEO, Aigo.ai Inc

Peter's first career was in electronics, which was followed by building a company from zero to 400 staff, and a successful IPO. Not only was Peter chief designer of the company’s comprehensive ERP suite, he also designed the system’s 4th generation database and custom programming language. Peter also has a keen interest in cognitive science and the inter-relationship between philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. Since the early 90's he has been researching AGI (artificial general intelligence), and in 2001 started Adaptive A.I. Inc., with the express goal of developing this technology. In 2008 Peter founded SmartAction.ai, which offers the only call automation solution powered by a (proto) AGI engine. He now heads up Aigo.ai Inc., which has developed and is commercializing an advanced conversational general-purpose personal assistant.

Nicolas Carey

Design Lead, Potato USA

Nicolas Carey

Design Lead, Potato USA

Nicolas leads the product design team at Potato, a digital product studio based in the US and the UK. Potato design, build and launch groundbreaking digital products and services. Their clients include Google and the BBC. At Potato, Nicolas has led voice projects for gaming clients, recently winning silver at Cannes for his role in creating Activision's Destiny 2 Alexa Skill. Prior to Potato, Nicolas worked at start-ups in both advertising and legal sectors on projects such as augmented reality and AI applications. You can find him on Twitter: @nsdcarey

Heather Downing

Senior Innovation Engineer, VML

Heather Downing

Senior Innovation Engineer, VML

Heather is a passionate coder and entrepreneur. She has experience working with Fortune 500 companies building enterprise-level voice, mobile and C#/.Net applications. She focuses on external thought leadership, encouraging fellow programmers to present on topics outside of the office and in the community. She is an international technical speaker and co-host of the YouTube channel "The Hello World Show" -- a weekly video series that interviews software masters and teaches the audience something valuable in less than 10 minutes. Heather encourages those with non-traditional backgrounds to enter the world of software development, as she changed careers at 27 and does not have a degree - yet has built a reputation as an early adapter of new tech. She is an advocate of women in tech, and part of Kansas City Women in Technology. When not coding, Heather spends her time as a competitive equestrian and learning the art of mounted archery.

Theodora Lau

Founder, Unconventional Ventures

Theodora Lau

Founder, Unconventional Ventures

Theodora (Theo) Lau is a speaker, writer, and innovator, whose work seeks to spark innovation to improve consumer financial well-being and health. She focuses on developing and growing an ecosystem of financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to better address the unmet needs of consumers, with keen interests in women and minority founders. As part of her work, she regularly mentors FinTech and HealthTech startups and fosters a growing partnered portfolio. Most recently recognized as LinkedIn Top Voice for Economy and Finance in 2017, top FinTech, Digital Transformation, and AI influencer by Onalytica.

Aakrit Vaish

CEO & Co-founder, Haptik

Aakrit Vaish

CEO & Co-founder, Haptik

Aakrit Vaish is the CEO & Co-founder of Haptik, one of the world’s largest chatbot platforms. Besides spearheading the overall business operations of the company, Aakrit also oversees key aspects such as revenue & finance, hiring, and defining the strategy and vision of the company. Driven by the belief that “an idea can take you to a great product, but people can help you build a great company”, he devotes almost half his time to recruiting the right talent for Haptik.

Sara Holoubek

CEO, Luminary Labs

Sara Holoubek

CEO, Luminary Labs

Sara Holoubek is the CEO and founder of Luminary Labs, a consultancy that develops strategies and innovation systems to help Fortune 500, government, and nonprofit organizations thrive in the face of change. She is also an active early stage investor. Sara is particularly passionate about the thorny problems that matter such as stemming chronic disease, closing the skills gap, rethinking the future of work, and using data to make smart cities safer. Sara writes and speaks extensively on the intersection of technology, innovation, and humanity. She has been recognized by LinkedIn as a 2017 Top Voice in Technology, Mashable as a female founder to watch, SmartCEO magazine as a 2017 New York Brava award winner, and PepsiCo WIN for her contributions to women in technology. Sara holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.B.A. from HEC in France.

Brielle Nickoloff

Lead of Voice User Experience Design and Research, Witlingo

Brielle Nickoloff

Lead of Voice User Experience Design and Research, Witlingo

Brielle Nickoloff is a Lead of Voice User Experience Design and Research at Witlingo, a Washington D.C., based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Brielle earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of Brielle’s research in the space began with a closer look at the ways one’s emotional reaction to a voice interface is notably more inflated than reactions to other types of user interfaces. She loves to design for maximally accessible and minimally intrusive technology by leveraging the beauty of natural human language.

Luciana Alexander Morais

Lead, Voice UX Research & Design, Witlingo

Luciana Alexander Morais

Lead, Voice UX Research & Design, Witlingo

Luciana Morais is a Lead Voice UX Research & Designer for Witlingo. She has over 7 years of experience in User Experience Research and Design. In her spare time, she likes to explore emerging technologies, and she dreams of one day designing a VR voice-controlled time machine game.

Noelle LaCharite

Leading Developer Experience for Cognitive Services, Microsoft

Noelle LaCharite

Leading Developer Experience for Cognitive Services, Microsoft

Noelle LaCharite, Leading Developer Experience for Cognitive Services at Microsoft Noelle is passionate about Solutions Architecture, Technical Training, and Technical Evangelism. She specializes in Microsoft AI, Cognitive Services and Pre-Built AI. She also performs keynote speeches and delivers workshops on Mindful Leadership, creating work-life harmony and crafting a vision for your life. Her work includes all day workshops for associations, executives and universities to help develop their mindful leadership skills. At conferences around the world you’ll find Noelle speaking about conversational AI and her success as an Alexa Skill Developer.

Martin Viau

VP of New Products and Technology, Phone.com

Martin Viau

VP of New Products and Technology, Phone.com

Martin is a software and product architect with several years of experience leveraging serverless architectures in production environments. Recently he led an innovation lab at Shopkeep and founded his own tech startup. Prior to that he was a VP of Technology at Deutsche Bank. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Université de Montréal and an M.Sc. Technology Management from Columbia University.

Alon Cohen

CTO/EVP, Phone.com

Alon Cohen

CTO/EVP, Phone.com

Alon is a respected entrepreneur and inventor, with five U.S. patents to his name. He is widely recognized as one of the creators of the VoIP industry, for which he has been recognized with numerous awards. Alon was the co-founder of VocalTec Communications, the first company to provide Internet voice technology worldwide. Alon holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, as well as an MBA from Tel Aviv University. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alon_Cohen

Emma Furlong

Lead Content Strategist, Clinc

Emma Furlong

Lead Content Strategist, Clinc

Emma has worked in Conversational AI at Clinc for a year, and before that worked for ForeSee in Marketing Analytics. She is a University of Michigan grad (as most people at Clinc are!) She has presented the Keynote at Money 20/20 Europe last month, as well as the keynote at Inside ETS this spring.

Diana Deibel

Senior Designer, Grand Studio

Diana Deibel

Senior Designer, Grand Studio

Diana Deibel is a Senior VUI Designer at the product design consultancy, Grand Studio, in Chicago. She has worked on massive call center IVRs, insurance and healthcare-based chatbots, and omnichannel experiences using voice-first design. Her recent co-talk Alexa, Tell Me About Ethics at the IA Summit 2018 is an example of her passion for ethical design and her advocacy for prompting designers and developers to think about the world we're creating. You can reach her on Twitter @dianadoesthis.

David Box

Business Development Manager, Macadamian, Inc.

David Box

Business Development Manager, Macadamian, Inc.

David Box is an internationally experienced business development and account management executive. He has spent the past 10 years working with customers in the healthcare space to develop products and services that improve patient outcomes and experience. David earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Massachusetts and a Master’s of Science in International Marketing Management from Boston University, where he currently teaches a master’s degree course on product innovation.

Mandy Chan

Developer Community Manager, Google

Mandy Chan

Developer Community Manager, Google

Mandy Chan is the Developer Community Manager on the Actions On Google team, where she is responsible for creating practical tools and content for the developer community. At I/O 2018, Mandy and her team published two Codelabs to guide developers on how to build Actions. Since then, the Codelabs have trained thousands of new developers from around the world. She is a frequent speaker at different developer conferences, including the Grace Hopper Conference in 2017 and 2018. She was recently invited as a guest on the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. You can hear more about her recent activities on http://bit.ly/gcp-mandy. Prior to Google, she made many early contributions to the voice community. One of her most frequently downloaded open source projects is called SSML Builder, which creates well-formed Speech Synthesis Markup Language without worrying about string concatenation. When she is not pondering how to improve the developer experience, you can find her programming, hiking in the mountains, or learning new magic tricks. You can learn more about Mandy by following her on Twitter (@MandyChanNYC)!

Meir Friedlander

EVP, Product, Operation and Business Development , Speech Morphing, Inc.

Meir Friedlander

EVP, Product, Operation and Business Development , Speech Morphing, Inc.

Meir is heading Product and Business at Speechmorphing, a personalized speech technology company. For the last 20 years, Mr. Friedlander has been leading Business and Product teams to successful deployments of on-demand cost-effective video, games and voice related services. Meir has experience with small, medium and large software companies, growing visions and ideas into successful global companies. He was the founder of Vsoft (acquired by L3), a pioneer of Video-On-Demand and network PVR. He served as the President & CEO of Vsoft for more than 8 years, and grew the global business into multi-million sustainable yearly recurring revenues. Prior to Speechmorphing, Meir was Vice President of Corporate Development at Playcast Media Systems (acquired by EA), a white label over-the-top cloud gaming software and services company; President & CEO at Eyecon Inc., a cloud based content discovery and home automation company and Chief Strategy Officer of Seambi Inc., a leading provider of dynamic video product placement based advertisements. As a venture capitalist with KGIF, he made multiple successful investments and served as a board member at Canesta (acquired by Microsoft) and GTC semiconductors. In addition, Mr. Friedlander held executive corporate and business development positions at Alvarion, Amdocs and DEC. Mr. Friedlander holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics & Computer Science and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University, both Magna Cum Lauda, and has directly contributed to 6 granted patents in the areas of video manipulations, interactive media advertisements, cross-languages prosody and media discovery and control.

Amy McIlvaine

Business Development Manager, AT&T Smart Cities

Amy McIlvaine

Business Development Manager, AT&T Smart Cities

Amy McIlvaine has spent her entire career focused on improving the public sector experience. This background has served her well in her current position as Business Development Manager, AT&T Smart Cities. Amy works with a variety of public sector organizations helping motivate their understanding of how to prepare their communities for the shift toward an ever-evolving digital world. This involves orchestrating the potential of what a connected smart city looks like and its impact on operations. Prior to AT&T, Amy was on the public-sector sales teams at Current powered by GE, Dell Software Group, SciQuest, Salesforce.com, LRN, EMC and Oracle. Her range of experience includes delivering enterprise on-premise, managed services, cloud, SaaS, PaaS and now sensor enabled IoT solutions. She started her career in the public sector working for the City of Philadelphia and the State of New York. Amy earned her BA at Boston College and MPA from New York University.

Will Hall

CCO, RAIN

Will Hall

CCO, RAIN

Will is the Chief Creative Officer at RAIN, leading combined teams of strategists, engineers, and designers. He serves on multiple advisory boards on Voice and emerging technology, and has been declared the "winner" of Pinterest. Over the past 14 years, he's worked at agencies with key clients like Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, Sony, Adult Swim, Puma and others. He is also an adjunct professor of Design at NYU.

Laurent Le Faucheur

Principal Engineer, ARM

Laurent Le Faucheur

Principal Engineer, ARM

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Laurent leads signal processing activities for embedded devices at Arm, with a focus on speech processing. He has over 30 years' experience in electronic design and manufacturing for consumer markets. Laurent holds an Engineering degree from ESEO, as well as a PhD. His 1991 PhD thesis was on text-to-speech synthesis.

Tavis Szeto

Tavis Szeto is currently Director of Mobility & Technology in Panasonic Industrial, a Division of Panasonic Corporation of North America. Within Panasonic, Tavis and his team are developing the strategy and executing new business development opportunities with North American startups innovating on technology, solutions or business models which disrupt traditional transportation. With over 20 years of marketing, technology and business development experience across various industries including broadband internet, wireless communications and intelligent electric vehicles, Tavis has been at the forefront of transformative technologies. Prior to Panasonic, Tavis served as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Faraday Future, a U.S. startup developing premium connected electric vehicles and Senior Director of the Automotive Group at ChargePoint, one of the world’s leading electric vehicle charging networks. He’s also held senior leadership positions at Pace, 2Wire and KLA-Tencor. Outside of work, Tavis enjoys spending time with his family, traveling, experiencing good food and keeping up with his San Francisco Bay Area sports teams.

Kenneth Jeanos

Chief Information Officer, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Kenneth Jeanos

Chief Information Officer, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Kenneth Jeanos serves as the Chief Information Officer for Panasonic Corporation of North America. In this capacity, he leads Information Systems operations in North America, and develops short and long-term business strategies that align with and support the company’s direction to drive innovation in the region. ​ ​ Ken is also the President of Panasonic’s internal Corporate Information Systems Company of Americas, a shared services organization that provides information technology services for Panasonic companies in North and South America as well as globally. In this capacity, he is responsible for identifying cost-effective and efficient solutions to leverage Panasonic’s information technology, business and website operations.​ ​ During his 28-year career at Panasonic, Ken has held senior management positions in sales, planning, operations, IT, Supply Chain and change management. Prior to this appointment, he served as Vice President of Operations for Panasonic Industrial Company, where he led strategic supply chain and e-business initiatives. ​ ​ Ken holds a BS in Applied Mathematics from Montclair State University and has completed executive management training at the International Institute of Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has served as an elected board member for Comptia EIDX group and received various honors for his leadership in IT, including the Panasonic Corporation of North America CEO award and Comptia Industry Contribution award. ​ Ken also serves on the advisory board for Channel Portal, a Silicon Valley start-up. One of Ken’s passions is coaching youth athletics. Over the past fifteen years he has coached recreational, little league, and USABL teams, and is currently the President of a non-profit organization that supports his local high school athletic program. Ken extends his love of coaching into the workplace, by personally mentoring employees to help them overcome obstacles and achieve success.

Kathleen Ellmore

Managing Director at Engagys

Kathleen Ellmore

Managing Director at Engagys

Kathleen is an award-winning, high energy, consumer health engagement expert with over twenty-five years of experience. She speaks regularly on the national stage on driving consumer health engagement, creating better consumer experience in healthcare and using data to drive consumer behavior. She has spent her career teasing out insights from consumer behavioral data in order to help companies better understand their consumers and drive behavior change. For the first fifteen years of her career she was a highly successful brand executive for leading consumer companies such as General Mills and Gillette, as well as media organizations and technology startups. Over the last twelve years she has transformed healthcare as a pioneer in bringing those same consumer marketing methodologies that get you to eat when you are not hungry and buy things you do not need to instead use those strategies for good by motivating consumers in their health. She consults on all topics related to consumer engagement and consumer experience for the top healthcare organizations in the country. Kathleen is a highly rated, engaging speaker, and is often is called “the best speaker of the conference.” Kathleen is frequently quoted in both national and trade press. Her bylines have appeared in Executive Insights, Predictive Modeling News, and AHIP Smart Brief. She recently received two Stevie awards, Maverick of the Year, Silver 2015 and Innovator of the Year, Bronze, 2016, for highlighting the greatest challenges and opportunities for improving the lives of people who are afflicted with chronic conditions. She has been recently named as consultant to the first-ever FDA Patient Engagement Advisory Committee (PEAC). https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellmore. Twitter handle: @kellmore1

Harry A. Dalessio

Head of Full Service Solutions, Prudential Retirment

Harry A. Dalessio

Head of Full Service Solutions, Prudential Retirment

Harry Dalessio is head of the Full-Service Solutions businesses within Prudential Retirement, a unit of Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE: PRU) and a leading provider of defined contribution, defined benefit, nonqualified deferred compensation plan administration, institutional investment and participant services. Since 1924, Prudential Retirement serves nearly 7,800 public, private and not- for-profit organizations and more than 4.3mm individuals accounts for over $427.6 billion of retirement account values. Dalessio has held other roles at Prudential. In his previous role, Dalessio led national sales, including full service corporate, tax exempt, investment-only stable value, pension risk transfer and nonqualified sales, plus the channel management team responsible for developing and implementing Prudential Retirement’s channel strategy. Prior to that, Dalessio was vice president, Eastern U.S. Corporate Sales, leading the team who represented Prudential's comprehensive defined contribution, defined benefit, and nonqualified products and services to corporate plan sponsors. Earlier in his career, Dalessio held regional sales leadership, client management, and operations positions with CIGNA Retirement & Investment Services. Dalessio has published several bylined articles in industry-related publications. He frequently meets with industry and national media to discuss opportunities and trends topical within the retirement market. Dalessio serves on the Board of Trustees for The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts and No Barriers USA. Dalessio earned a B.A. in Economics from Providence College and a master’s in business administration in Finance from Fordham University. He holds FINRA Series 4, 6, 24, 26 and 79 licenses.

Shruti Rawoot

Shruti Rawoot

Shruti Rawoot is the Chief Information Officer for Prudential Retirement and Head of Retirement Information Technology Services (RITS). She joined Prudential after serving as Vice President, Partner Products Technology and Services at Western Union, where she designed and led the product and technology strategy to support the company’s move to a more customer- focused digital business strategy. Shruti is a results-oriented leader who brings an exceptional track record of designing and executing rapid, comprehensive technology change. Throughout her career, Shruti has led transformational change by fostering a culture of innovation and developing strong partnerships. Her agility, proven leadership skills and customer focus will help accelerate the critical imperatives within RITS and advance Prudential Retirement’s business strategy. Earlier in her career, Shruti worked in many regional and global technology roles for Credit Suisse and Bankers Trust (Deutsche Bank). Shruti is a graduate of engineering and has an MBA from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ. She serves as a Board Advisor to “Parvarish,” a consortium of museum schools in India, and teaches music at Vivekanand Vidyapith in Wayne, NJ. An active graduate mentor to her alma mater, Shruti is also a member of NY FinTech Women’s Leadership Forum.

Dr. Jason Mars

CEO of Clinc

Dr. Jason Mars

CEO of Clinc

Dr. Jason Mars is the co-founder and CEO of Clinc, the company that created the world’s most sophisticated and comprehensive conversational A.I. platform for enterprises. Recently recognized as one of the ten most innovative CEOs in banking by Bank Innovation, he is also a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan where he directs Clarity Lab, one of the best places in the world to be trained in A.I. and system design. He is an active part of the IBM Watson Conversational System Research Center and participates in ongoing collaborative research with Intel and the National Science Foundation. Jason has devoted his career to solving difficult real-world problems with A.I., computer vision, and natural language processing at scale. Prior to The University of Michigan, Jason was a professor at the University of California San Diego. He also worked at Google, Intel and IBM. Jason’s work building the world’s first open-source platform for constructing large-scale A.I. and deep learning-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) has been recognized globally and continues to have a significant impact on industry and academia. Jason holds a PhD in computer science from University of Virginia.

Gaurav Kuchhal

Chief Product Officer, Alan

Gaurav Kuchhal

Chief Product Officer, Alan

Gaurav Kuchhal is the Chief Product Officer of Alan, Voice AI service for Enterprise to voice-enable daily business tasks. Gaurav is a mobile and voice industry veteran and has been very successful launching several first wave of transformative products. He led the industry-first voice assistant at Tellme that got acquired by Microsoft. Previously as Managing Director, Gaurav provided leadership to 2 iconic properties: SourceForge & Slashdot. He also managed the Mobile division of Salesforce.com where his team built world’s first cloud platform to develop and distribute enterprise mobile apps. Earlier in his career, Gaurav built Oracle Mobile business from ground-up leading the product and formulating strategic partnerships.

Ryan Romero

Senior UX Designer on the Alexa for Apps team, Amazo

Ryan Romero

Senior UX Designer on the Alexa for Apps team, Amazo

Ryan Romero is currently a Senior UX Designer on the Alexa for Apps team at Amazon. He focuses on simplifying app services across Amazon’s ecosystem of multimodal interfaces. Before Amazon, Ryan has worked on impactful, award winning digital products and services at Apple, Nike and R/GA. Ryan earned a Bachelor of Arts in Information Technology and Informatics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He was born and raised in Northern New Jersey and is happy to be back in his home state to share his thoughts on the future of voice technology and devour slices of his favorite Jersey pizza.

Joel Beckerman

Founder + Composer, Man Made Music

Joel Beckerman

Founder + Composer, Man Made Music

Joel Beckerman is the Founder of Man Made Music, a strategic music and sound studio that exists at the forefront of music, sound and brands. As innovators and in their field, Man Made Music has crafted the sonic identities for global brands such as AT&T, Deloitte, Allstate, and Nissan. Their work began in network television creating themes for Entertainment Tonight, HBO Feature Presentations, CBS This Morning, Super Bowl on NBC, ESPN 30 for 30, FX Has The Movies, and has evolved into pioneering a musical approach for brands in an increasingly post-visual world. A 20-year veteran of the field, Beckerman, is a known thought-leader it the world of sound and business, author of The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel and Buy and a Fast Company Most Creative. Joel and the Man Made Music team have been featured on stage at major conferences including SXSW, London Design Week, C2 Montreal, Fast Company Innovation Festival and Future of Storytelling. Twitter: @joelbeckerman, @Man_Made_Music Instagram: @man_made_music

Patrick Smith

President, Senior Portal, Inc.

Patrick Smith

President, Senior Portal, Inc.

Patrick Smith holds a BS in computer science and has nearly two decades of professional experience in web application development. Taking the time to get to know the senior living industry, Patrick has immersed himself in the DNA of many communities. Along the way, he has discovered that the successful adoption of technology for this population is critically dependent on how well that technology serves the unique needs of each community. Today’s seniors, perhaps more than ever, want technology that increases their quality of life. As a result, Patrick and the team at Senior Portal have developed a number of solutions that work well to accelerate the growth and adoption rate of new technologies.

Christine Beck

Content Strategist, Bank of the West

Christine Beck

Content Strategist, Bank of the West

Christine leads a team of UX content strategists at Bank of the West in San Francisco. Her team is focused on providing effective digital content strategy solutions for the bank and their customers. Christine is a content strategist with a UX, IA and library science background, and she sees herself as the glue between creatives, developers, and other disciplines on digital teams. She uses her systems knowledge to see patterns, and her love of storytelling to help people see unique solutions for their difficult problems. Christine’s been in the digital space since 2000, working at the forefront of innovation in the fields of search technology, software, mobile payments, with agencies such as Method, Sapient, and R/GA’s embedded team at Google.

David Heafitz

Vice President in GBTS, Prudential

David Heafitz

Vice President in GBTS, Prudential

David Heafitz is a Vice President in GBTS at Prudential in enterprise mobile and web application development. He is an active member of many of Prudential's business resource groups and represents GBTS in several talent initiatives and outreach programs, including the technology collaboration initiatives with Newark Venture Partners. David has a BA in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College and a Master of Business Administration from Columbia University and London Business School.

Kountinya Sai

CEO, Market Simplified

Kountinya Sai

CEO, Market Simplified

Fintech partner developer with 13 years of experience.

Chris Hopen

Technologist and CEO & Co-Founder, Switch, Inc.

Chris Hopen

Technologist and CEO & Co-Founder, Switch, Inc.

Chris Hopen is an experienced and proven technological visionary and C-level executive. Known for his ability to be the first to identify and address industry needs with breakthrough solutions, he has led several successful ventures and exits. Serving as its CEO and Co-Founder, his most recent company, Tappin, provided secure remote access to and from any file stored on a device. In 2011, the company was acquired by Globalscape, who continues to offer the product developed by Hopen. Prior to Tappin, Hopen was a Co-Founder and CTO of Aventail, one of the first SSL VPN companies. Aventail was acquired by Sonicwall in 2007. Hopen served as STO for Spry, the first Internet-in-a-box offering, where he met David Pool, Co-Founder of Switch. Spry was acquired by CompuServe in 1996. Hopen has authored more than 14 patents throughout his career.

Zachary Brown

Research Assistant in the Perception, Control, and Cognition Lab (PCCL), Brigham Young University

Zachary Brown

Research Assistant in the Perception, Control, and Cognition Lab (PCCL), Brigham Young University

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Zachary is a Research Assistant in the Perception, Control, and Cognition Lab (PCCL) at Brigham Young University, where his research focuses on developing software that captures high-level meaning and semantic information. He and his team recently published an academic paper in the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2017, which introduced an algorithm for increasing an autonomous agent's accuracy in analogical reasoning tasks. Currently, he is in a team of researchers competing in the Amazon Alexa Prize competition and enjoying it every step of the way. Moving forward, Zachary is interested in utilizing unsupervised learning methods to reduce the amount of necessary training data for machine learning algorithms, as well as research in emergent communication protocols.